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Moody
Get personalized recommendations based on your mood!
Project Vision
There are various streaming platforms around with numerous options for movies and TV shows to watch. But when it comes to deciding what to watch, these platforms can be pretty overwhelming. Moody is an app that acknowledges the user’s mood and gives personalized recommendations across different platforms.
What I did
  • UX/UI Design
  • Interaction Design
  • UX Research
Timeline
  •  June 2021 - August 2021
  • 3 Months

Problem Statements
  • Having the home screen dominated by English content can be intimidating for Non-English speaking users.
  • Sometimes choosing a movie to watch is a difficult task. There is a lack of an explore screen that makes decisions for the user.
  • Too many options on a single screen become overwhelming.

EMPATHIZE
To understand the user problems and identify their needs, I conducted quantitative and qualitative research. My goal was to build an app that is usable, useful, and enjoyable to users from different generations (i.e., Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X). It helped me understand user pain points and how to make the recommendation feature accessible and valuable.
Competitive Analysis
To construct a concise and solid foundation for Moody, I had to venture out and see what similar prominent applications were already doing and what user goals they were not reaching. I evaluated several vital features from user surveys and identified which ones Moody could capitalize on to have a leg up over other applications.

I found that none of these applications took into account the user's mood. And the recommendations seemed to be minimal.


DEFINE
After collating data from the first phase, I continued to define the design problems and challenges.
User Personas
How Does Genre Affect Our Mood?
I took the secondary research approach to understand how different genres can affect a user’s mood. From various sources, I was able to conclude that:
  • Tragedies can make people happier in the short-term.
  • Comedies can help reduce anxiety, aggression and fear.
  • Horror can cause a spike in adrenaline levels.
  • Romantic movies can give you a few hours of relief from your life.
  • Watching fantasy (Harry Potter) enhances creativity.

IDEATE
After understanding user needs, I produced some ideas to address the problem statements.
Solutions
  • An explore screen which takes the user’s mood as input and then suggests movies and TV shows of specific genres to affect the user’s mood positively.
  • Providing an easy to access option on every screen for changing language and region.
  • Simple UI with important features.
PROTOTYPE
Wireframes
Before moving onto high-fidelity wireframes, I wanted to get a feel of the app's core when put in front of me.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
After I was satisfiied with the P&P Wireframes, I built high-fidelity prototypes using Figma.




Takeaways & Next Steps
Working on this project helped me further explore the design thinking process. I got to do a lot of research and understand distinct users' needs while keeping accessibility a priority. Making my own components and style guide helped me think about designing for a product more systematically and with more granularity.

In the next phase, this application can also utilize computer vision concepts to easily recognize user emotions/moods to make the suggestion process more accurate.