Regulating Mood Swings

Understanding and regulating the human brain is a complex task, given its role in articulating emotions, generating chemicals for action, and reacting to stimuli. Mood swings, abrupt behavioural changes stemming from subjective reasons, pose a common challenge in this realm. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of digital products, particularly social media, has profoundly influenced human emotions. Thus, the goal is to empathize with individuals and utilize design thinking techniques to comprehend their behaviour during mood swings and develop practical solutions addressing their needs.

Act One

Prior to commencing the design process, there was a recognition of the sensitivity surrounding the topic. Given that relying solely on subjective experiences of mood swings wasn't sufficient for primary research, secondary research was conducted on related topics to broaden understanding.

During the secondary research phase, a thorough examination focused on mood swings, beginning with foundational definitions and delving into their roots, including mood dependencies, feelings, and emotions. This exploration provided a clear understanding of their distinctions.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

  • The mood is defined as an affective state; it is triggered based on particular events in an individual’s life. They are long-term, last for hours, days or weeks and are less intense than emotions and feelings

  • Emotions can refer to reactions where our body reacts to daily events. They are intense but hold on for a short period. The reaction occurs when the chemicals are released by the brain when the event occurs.

  • When the brain computes these emotions, there is another branch of human reaction: feelings. The way humans feel about an event occurs by processing emotions. The core effect is how humans feel at a point in time. This can scale from valiance and auroral.

Studying mood regulation involves exploring how humans manage their moods using various techniques. This research aids in understanding the strategies people employ to address mood swings. Various models of mood regulation focus on the reasons behind and methods for managing moods, leading to classification based on two criteria:

MOOD REGULATION

  • this will lead to two different ends, one being positive mood improvement, andthe second will be an extreme collapse in moodimprovement.

  • it points from automatic and controlled strategies. Automatic mood regulation stands for its name — it triggers automatically by cognitive mechanism. Controlled mood regulation is where people put themselves into events to control andregulate their mood.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

Secondary research provided lot of knowledge and insights to design and articulate primary research. It pointed out areas to focus and collect data to analyse and synthesise information necessary. In order to make it more effective, a research plan was executed with goals and areas that align and support each other.

RESEARCH GOALS

To understand how people conceptualise mood.

R1 -

R2 -

To understand and extract different kinds of mood variations, they go through.

R3 -

To understand women’s mood swings during the mensuration cycle.

R4 -

To understand their own set of mood regulation techniques.

METHODOLOGY & FINDINGS

  • The research methodology chosen was to conduct qualitative research by analysing research goals and areas.

  • This consideration is because the research area and goals require a subjective response. To empathise with users, it was necessary to understand their experience with mood swings and their self-regulation process.

  • The findings are explored and categorised based on research areas; this method made it easy to make sense of data and empathise effectively with participants. The findings are explored in this order — “ideology on mood swings”,“types of mood variations”, and “types of mood regulations”.

Ideology on mood swings explore basic experience of occurrence and controllability. They both provided valuable data on what really is the root cause and handling probability.

IDEOLOGY ON MOOD SWINGS

  • Overall, participants have a good understanding of mood swings and bipolar disorder — “Mixed feelings that are difficult to define.”

  • A common type of occurance is by external circumstances. “Logical Mood swings” on the other hand that bothers people by external forces such as university grades, parents or assignment deadlines

  • The responses can be measured in two aspects — that was controllable and uncontrollable. Clearly, people suffered to concentrate on their tasks and communicate with people. This self-control validation leads to mood regulation. Mood regulation helps people to stay on track both mentally and emotionally.

Mood regulation was the most critical research finding; it is the set of techniques people use to handle and manage their mood swings. These techniques can be categorised into manual or digital. This category was crafted from the responses.

MOOD VARIATION & REGULATION

Manual and digital tasks include both good and bad habits. The term habits are linked because these regulation are based on individuals' habits. Choosing between bad an good habits is based on the intensity and practice a person is going through.

Sad — "Journal my thoughts."

Frustrated — "Order food online."

  • Besides card sorting, empathy maps were created to enhance empathy and inform design decisions. The four quadrants in empathy maps delineate specific user types and their behaviour within an experiential framework.

  • The problem statement is a crucial technique propelling the design process forward, including brainstorming. It integrates data from empathy maps and personas, which are group-based, into a singular statement that encompasses every user.

With the Affinity diagram, the goal is to present all the research data in notes and then group them into individual categories that can provide meaningful data. Grouping similar data led to three cluster. Cluster One — is about subjective understanding, Cluster Two — Reason behind mood swings and Cluster three — Regulation techniques.

In this design stage, the primary focus was on analysing and synthesizing data using essential tools to define a user-centric problem statement. Subsequently, an effective ideation process was conducted based on this statement.

Act Two

First, each core learning is identified, such as the controlled regulation technique and journaling. These insights or "how might" questions are then selected. Subsequently, all requirements are gathered, followed by brief 3-10 minute ideation sessions on each learning.

IDEATION

  • Controlled regulation techniques, encompassing daily habits like social media use, gaming, and online food ordering, significantly influence how humans manage mood swings. When ideation began on this topic, the focus was on fostering creativity, but participant responses showed limited encouragement in this regard.

  • After the idea sparked, a brief secondary research endeavour ensued to explore the correlation between mood swings and creativity. Findings indicate a robust association between bipolar mood disorder, everyday creativity, and eminent creativity, albeit with complex patterns.

HOW MIGHT WE HELP USERS ADAPT TO CONTROLLED REGULATION TECHNIQUES?

  • The first step to implementing this feature is documenting the user’s interests, hobbies and other associated favourites.

  • Utilizing this data, the application will generate prompts to guide users into a creative state. To enhance comprehension, a framework called "relational mapping" was developed to visualize and link data.

  • The framework interconnects all sub-domains to generate prompts, each with its underlying layers. User input is processed by the language model across these domains to compute a prompt.

FRAMEWORK

The final output of the language model can be like:

“PITCH AN OUTLINE STORY FOR THE CHARACTER JESSE PINKMAN”

HOW MIGHT WE ENCOURAGE PRODUCTIVE HABITS TO CONTROL MOOD SWINGS?

  • Habits are daily practices; they are closely associated with regulation techniques. Habits are effective based on user scenarios.

  • The habits scorecard idea was inspired, and the feature is tweaked from “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

  • The goal of the scorecard is to track habit practice and understand actions without any judgements. Firstly, a list of habits is created, either good or bad. Once a

    list is created, habits will be marked by signs.

Design principles are a set of motivations and goals that will drive the next step of the design process (prototyping). Design principles are not based on visual design but on our insights and learnings

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

  • The system primarily aims to foster creativity amid mood swings, employing a controlled regulation technique to enable users to explore their creative potential.

  • The app's features need to be swift and efficient due to the detrimental impact of excessive screen time on both physical and mental health. Therefore, every tool must ensure quick and effective usage.

  • Sharing work involves users documenting their creative processes and contributing to the community's exploration of various prompts from fellow users.

  • The community differs from typical social media platforms as it promotes sharing user work and prompts without incorporating like or comment features to prevent judgment.

Prototyping and testing marked the final stage of the design thinking process. The primary focus was on iteration through the creation of low-fidelity prototypes, followed by testing to establish effective interaction between the product and the user.

Act Three

PROTOTYPING & TESTING

In this step, creativity, minimalism, and iteration were crucial. A single prototype design is insufficient; testing with users enhances product effectiveness. Thus, prototyping and testing follow this sequence — Sketching, low-fidelity prototype & testing and high-fidelity & testing.

  • The methodology applied was usability testing, open-ended questions are assigned to users with tasks and low fidelity prototype designed in Figma. Tasks were focused on features and how well the interaction is. Upon responses from users the recommendations were considered and iterated accordingly.

  • The tasks were focused on primary features of the product, for example — generating prompt based on interest, creating a new habit, modifying existing habit, exploring new shortcuts and activating shortcuts .

Lo-fi Testing Results

Exploring User Pain Points

  • For habit regulation, a user suggested consolidating all habits into one daily calendar instead of each habit having its own. This idea was promptly considered and initially implemented through quick sketching to facilitate rapid iteration.

  • While this layout works, displaying all habits simultaneously may lead to cognitive overload, hindering users from gaining specific insights into each habit or making regulation overwhelming.

  • High-fidelity testing emphasized the application's functionality and design. Jakob Nielsen's heuristics, comprising ten principles evaluating the system interface, were applied in the testing methodology. Each testing participant received five tasks, along with their descriptions and a high-fidelity prototype.

  • Testing revealed consistent performance regarding overall interaction and design, with minor issues identified for resolution. A brief card sorting technique was employed to identify shared pain points from the test results, aiding in design decisions.

Hi-fi Testing Results

Exploring User Pain Points

  • Switch between prompts and community — Initially, an icon served as the primary switch between the two options, causing frustration for some users. It was replaced with a segment picker for quicker navigation, along with a more consistent design to address this issue.

  • Habit scorecard requires instruction — Documentation was provided to explain the scorecard and its terminology, aiding user comprehension.

Design Showcase

TAKEAWAYS

Existing mood swing regulation solutions have inspired this project, shaping its unique ideation and design approach to assist individuals. The main goal is to promote creativity, fostering motivation and positivity. In the realm of generative artificial intelligence, human creativity often remains unexplored. This project and its design solution aim to illuminate this aspect of human creativity further.

Impact

Both primary and secondary research contributed to gaining a core understanding of human behaviour, enabling empathy and the crafting of a user-centric solution. This highlights the effective utilization of design thinking methodology in the project.

Learning

CREDIT

Case Study banner image Source - Photographer: Yakub Merchant (View his work)