hiMoment - Your digital happiness guru

thank you @__tosh for hunting! My name is Christoph, I am the co-founder of hiMoment, an app that helps people happier and grow, featuring hiMo the happiness guru. hiMo’s method combines research in positive psychology with smart algorithms and an entertaining user experience. We hope that it will help as many people as possible become the best versions of themselves - whether it is to become happier, more confident, or more motivated to pursue one’s goals. My cofounder @mrozilla will answer all questions related to the product and experience, while I am happy to take your questions regarding psychology and the business side of things. Try it out and let us know what you think!

@natalie_korotaeva cheers! The conversational interface is crucial to the whole experience. hiMo guides you through the whole process, gives you advice, and motivates you. Just like a gym trainer, he’s someone who you can trust, someone who will be there for you and push you if necessary. It only made sense to be able to talk to him 🙌 When it comes to chatbots, we’re doing several things that won’t work in the limited UI in Messenger or anywhere else (e.g. the whole interaction in the Flow screen, where you’re selecting which moment means to you the most). Here's a little secret, though 😬 I honestly can’t wait to build hiMo as a proper Messenger chatbot, and I'm cooking something special over the weekends 💪 I’m expecting it to be more of an addition to the app experience (and a fun experiment!) than a complete shift of our focus but we’ll see how that goes 🤘

@natalie_korotaeva @mrozilla True, Messenger is closed to SDK's.

@stefan_adelmann I like the "anti social network", might steal it 😬 There’s plenty of apps that focus on sharing your moments with others, just think about Facebook or Instagram. There’s one issue with these, though. Everything on social media is immediately quantified. How many likes, and hearts, and shares we get on every single post. This gets into your brain 😝 hiMoment is intimate. When it comes to happiness, you’re not sharing your moments with everyone, you’re sharing your happy moments with the person that matters the most—yourself. hiMo motivates you to add anything that makes you happy and nobody will judge you :) We’re looking into ways of including your friends in the whole thing (imagine tagging your best friend in a moment you’ve experienced together) but we can’t lose that intimacy in there. Our first test here are shared collections—you can generate a link for any of your collections and send it to anyone you want 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👧👩‍👩‍👧‍👧 Have a look at this example: https://shared.himoment.com/coll...

@mrozilla I think this is a good plan. I like the idea of sharing a moment with a friend on a one-to-one basis. I think you really have to be careful with social features, otherwise you might annoy users who feel like "oh, it's just about sharing again." :-) But again, I think this has enourmous potential because it really reflects the Zeitgeist. So, keep up the great work! :-)

@stefan_adelmann Exactly, "intimate social" would probably be the keyword for these interactions. And I absolutely agree that it would be greatly beneficial to getting more people on board, sharing a moment with a friend who isn't using hiMoment yet is a very natural growth tool 📈 Thanks a lot!

@theashtube Even windows phone. Reason: Windows phone users have it tough anyways, they deserve to be happy as well!

@theashtube cheers! The whole website is a big experiment at the moment 😬 We're still collecting data (hopefully will get a lot more today 💪), but so far it seems that unifying the looks of the website and the app works great for the users 🖥📱 Going for both platforms at the same time was a given, and with Cordova/React Native it's actually quite easy these days 🤘 If you've got any more feedback, hit me up!

@christoph_loewenherz Good point!

@mrozilla Nice, great to see it's easier than before to develop on multiple operating systems for mobile.

@clemenshelm thanks for your question. There are a couple of concepts we are linking together. When hiMo asks you what the best thing of your day ways, we are using the so called “savoring technique” that has been researched for decades and identified to be one of the best things we can do to improve subjective well being. Fred Bryant is a leading research on this specific topic. hiMo will also pose several happiness challenges to you, all of which are based on current research. In FLOW, we are showing you two of your moments and ask you which makes you happier - again and again. Here we couple "savoring" with "decision making". There is quite some research that connects happiness and our ability to make choices. Most notably, it appears that similar brain regions are affected when we are happy and when we make decisions. But no one has actually connected these two elements the way we are doing it in FLOW, and we are ourselves curious about it: We see that it works; we see that people really like it. But it's never been researched, so we are now partnering up with a university to investigate its effects.

@christoph_loewenherz Cool, thanks! I'm gonna give it a try. I'll let you know how it's working out for me ;)

@clemenshelm great, thank you!

@bizarrochris cheers! Have a look at what I wrote to @natalie_korotaeva just above—including a little secret as well 🙀

@markus_raunig thanks for your interest. This comes up very often, even our earliest test users (friends and family) were very keen on this. The intimate experience in hiMoment absolutely has to be accompanied by the feeling of privacy— we believe in "share it with yourself". At the same time, our artificial intelligence needs to be able to work with the data to be able to help you be happier. Tricky situation. To solve this, this we’re looking into the concepts of differential privacy—ultimately being able to draw conclusions from big-enough datasets without being able to identify the individual records. For now, have a look at our privacy promise: https://himoment.com/legal/privacy/

@markus_raunig When you're in you're in, whether its FB or Insta, (or here). You've already agreed.

@klaus_buchroithner thanks Klaus!

@peterbuch cheers! Have a look at what I wrote to @natalie_korotaeva above for details but in general, we've hit some UI limitations to delivering the experience we wanted to 😐 However, there's this secret experiment I'm cooking over the weekends, we'll see how it goes 💪

@peterbuch UI limitations aside, it's also to be plattform-independent. Also makes monetization easier, and I am a bit worried that FB will do the same thing they did with pages (throtteling organic reach massively) What are your thoughts on this?

@dimnls thanks for your question! Science knows a lot of practical things that we can do to become happier, but unfortunately that knowledge isn’t very accessible - either we don’t know about it or the findings are difficult to implement. that's why we created hiMoment. Our happiness guru hiMo guides you through the method that we have created. In essence, he helps you focus your attention on the good things your life by regularly asking you to write down the good things that happen in your life. It's the focus on these small moments and that shift in focus on good things that has been shown to be one of the crucial differences between happy and unhappy people. For most people, happiness really is an inside job.