Feely

Roles: Design Cofounder / Illustrator

Feely is a personal journal tool allowing people talk about their feeling meaningfully and comfortably.

MVP Features

The Feely team were composed by 4 people with full time jobs living in 3 different cities. We needed a clear vision on the product definition and goals in the roadmap. Our phase one was clear that there were 3 functions needed: Check-in function, Home (feed) page to see friends' activities, and my profile.

1. Check-in: log in self feelings here - sharing or keeping in secret on my own choice.
2. Home (Feed): see friends' emotions and do something about it.
3. My profile: the user could track his emotion patterns and learn more about himself from the built-in information visualization tools.

Data Visualization Tools

Data visualization tools were the key in Feely so users could dive deep and learn from themselves. We launched the pie chart in MVP and then timeline in the phase 2. 

The pie chart gave an overview of the emotion history. The user could learn quickly about his life being mostly positive or negative. The timeline provided a deeper dive into understanding self emotion patterns (e.g. I see myself always feeling depressed on Wednesday afternoon. Is there anything I can do about it?) We hoped from these 2 dimensions of personal retrospective, Feely could change the world from a tangible personal step.

Besides in-app tools, we generated an end-of-year report based on the data from October to December 2012. Most of the data were based in New York. To bring the positive energy to the world, we purposely displayed the positive results only: the most inspiring and most loving neighborhoods, the happiest time of the day and the comparison between male and female's top 3 emotions.

User Testing

We localized the app for the two major markets: English and Chinese. To ensure the product delivering the correct messaging, we regularly ran user testing emoticons and UI in two aspects: universalization and localization.

Universalization
The UI and emoticons needed to be understood by everyone from different background, culture and age. We incorporated feedback and iterated design quickly.

Localization
However, emoticons also needed to reflect the personality in the local culture. We solicited and adapted the trendy slangs into our emoticons. For instance, "embarrassed" in English world is usually represented by a facepalm; in Chinese (or Asia) world, due to largely influenced by Japan Manga culture, people like to use three lines on the face to show the embarrassment.

What We Learned

Feely didn't fly. Here are important lessons we learned from the process:

1. Adjust the project goals on the go. All successful companies today also went through many phases of transformation on their business goals and positioning. We started Feely as "a social platform to share your feeling with close friends" and didn't realize right away investors wouldn't buy any social networks idea.

2. Emotion is very private. People loved to share positive and generic emotions. When it came to the feelings, things were different. Although we repositioned ourself later as "mini personal journal", it's too late to repaint our image from "social networks". 

3. There are always competitions . During the proejct, Facebook launched new check-ins with feelings and emoticons. We knew we were onto something. But if we couldn't figure a different positioning, we were out.