Building Shine’s Interactive Mood Check-in

One of the toughest parts of being human: Coping with negative emotions.

After studying Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, the Shine team saw an opportunity to bring an emotional acceptance feature into the app.

Our concept: Create an interactive and compassionate chatbot that allows users to identify their emotions and receive personalized messaging and content—including articles, meditations, and journaling prompts—to help them work through their feelings.

In this v2 of our chatbot, we worked with user feedback to add more mood options and chat pathways, including a pathway for emotions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Role: Content Design and Lead UX Writer

Team: Engineering, CX Team

Problem: Our CX team reported that users wanted more mood options in our interactive chatbot as well as fresh content recommendations

Solution: Create a wider set of mood options, using weather icons to prime users to remember that feelings come and go. Just like the weather, our emotions are not permanent

Tools used: Mixpanel, Pen & Paper, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Techniques, User Testing

Results: Increased WAU/MAU, 97% of users reporting a positive impact on their mental health after using the Shine app