Exist

An early look at mood tracking

In the early stages of building Exist, we decided it was most sensible to connect to the APIs of services people were already using. We wanted to tap into data that was already being created, rather than reinvent the wheel.

The single attribute where we go against this is mood tracking. We think it's important to track how you're feeling so that we can find correlations between what you do and your mood, and so later we can try and optimise your days towards a higher mood score.

Users who have Mood by Email connected get a nightly email asking them to rate their day out of 5. Here's how we explain it in the email:

Reply to this email, above the line, with your mood and a one-sentence summary of your day.

Your mood should be a number between 1 and 5 inclusive, and best sum up how you felt today.

1 = Terrible day
2 = Not great day
3 = Average day
4 = Pretty good day
5 = Amazing day

So your reply might look like this:

4
Today was good, I had a burrito.

While sending an email isn't the most optimal way to ask users for information, it's the best compromise when we can't send push notifications (as we are but a humble web app). And some people even enjoy it:

Filling out the daily @ExistApp mood email has become something I really look forward to.

— Stig Eh (@Stiggeh) April 23, 2014

With our new backer beta users recording their mood for the last three weeks, we have enough data to look at some aggregates.

Mood by day of week

No. records	Day	Average mood
218	Sunday	3.5367
224	Monday	3.4107
228	Tuesday	3.3202
197	Wednesday	3.2487
194	Thursday	3.4227
193	Friday	3.4767
210	Saturday	3.7000

Here are some interesting points from this data:

• Weekends are the best.
• But Sundays are only a little better than Fridays and Mondays. Perhaps the impending start of the working week takes the fun out of them a little.
• Wednesdays are the worst. Known as "hump day", but perhaps should more accurately be called "trough day", the middle of the week is when our users are at their lowest. Tuesday comes second.
• People are less likely to reply on a weekend. Ignoring the skewed numbers for Weds-Fri, as some users haven't been signed up and recording their mood for a full three weeks yet, there's a slight dip on Saturday and Sunday where some people are having too much fun to worry about emails.

Mood by continent

We don't have enough users to accurately represent all continents, but here are the big ones:

No. records	Continent	Average mood
516	North America	3.5291
401	Australia	3.3392
493	Europe	3.3996

Americans are slightly happier than the rest of us, and Australians are coming last. It will be interesting to check again in six months and see if the season has anything to do with this — it's Autumn in the southern hemisphere, but Spring in the northern hemisphere. I'll be curious to see any long-term changes based on season.

We'll keep looking at interesting numbers from Exist as we gather more data, so make sure to subscribe via RSS or follow us on Twitter for updates.