We turned years of journals into a Feeling Trail
When you have been journaling for years, your past can start to feel like one long blur.
You know that some periods were difficult and others felt lighter—but it is surprisingly hard to see when things changed, what happened around those changes, or how long their effects lasted.
That is why we built Feeling Trail for TreeHole.
Feeling Trail transforms journal conversations into a visual history of emotional comfort, feelings, and energy.
Instead of reducing an entire day to a generic mood icon, it lets you:
- Scan daily comfort through a heatmap
- Open a day to see its main feeling and energy
- Move between month, year, and all-time views
- Notice changes around meaningful moments
- Look back across years without reading every entry again
Here is a 15-second walkthrough:
One of the hardest design decisions was choosing what the visualization should actually communicate.
Our early versions contained too many symbols and colors. They looked detailed, but users could not immediately tell what had changed. Longer time ranges were even worse: an entire year could collapse into what looked like a single color.
We eventually moved toward a comfort-based heatmap and changed the year and all-time views to emphasize relative changes, longer patterns, and significant shifts.
The goal is not to label someone or tell them how they should feel. It is to help them recognize the shape of their own experience.
Feeling Trail is designed for private reflection. It is not a psychological assessment, diagnosis, or medical service.
I would love feedback from other makers and journal users:
When looking back across several years of journals, what would you want to see first—a visual timeline of emotional changes, or the major life events connected to those changes?
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