YouHue gives meaning back to the throwaway question, "How are you?" by turning an empty, polite obligation into a meaningful connection. We designed YouHue to tap into the basic motivations to associate, express, reciprocate kindness, and feel heard.
It’s an easy way to connect, bond, and empathize with people in a fun, but intimate way. There is none of the inefficiency of traditional chat messaging, just the simple, “How are you?” request and response.
There are nine beautifully-illustrated moods -- Happy, Excited, Romantic, Calm, Meh, Confused, Stressed, Sad, and Angry -- each rendered in a corresponding color. Once a mood is chosen, you can add up to 500 characters of context and, with a tap, share with selected friends.
Each mood you share is tracked in your Timeline, so you can gain insight into your mood changes over time and with different people.
Engineered with passionate and careful attention to detail, YouHue is the social mood tracking app for iPhone.
Thank you! Feeling *Excited* to hear feedback on our work!
YouHue has been an amazing product to create. Our talented team is putting in a lot of passionate effort, and we are committed to making YouHue just as meaningful and fun to use as it has been to build.
We think we've found a very relevant crossroads between psychological science, user-centered design, and technology. Our work doesn't stop here, and we're feeling Excited to grow! :)
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Great idea and beautiful execution.
It's so tough to get people to use a new app for simple communication. Communication is already so fragmented.
Maby consider building it as a Facebook Messenger app and then slowly peeling people off into your standalone app.
@gerbz Our hypothesis was that, by creating a dedicated space we would enhance and encourage a unique interaction that is not properly afforded in traditional messaging. In the context of messaging, the question "How are you?" has many implications for obligatory subsequent interactions (extended chatting as each party tries to live up to the imagined expectations of the other).
This burdens the asker such that they don't ask, and stifles the responder such that they hold back for fear of burdening the asker. We've found through user feedback (so far) that by pulling "How are you?" out of a messaging context, people ask more (no obligation to engage in prolonged small talk) and people respond more (no fear of burdening the user). In fact, our research indicated to us that two people can both feel connected over just an intimate update.
An important second piece of data (so far) is that people *do* reach out via messenger and chat about the mood share when it is necessary (it's funny, it's worrisome, it's interesting, the friend needs support, need more information).
We also get more "How are you?" requests and responses simply because it is the "thing to do" on YouHue, which lowers the hurdle for everyone to connect more fully and more often over the question.
We definitely considered building it as a FB Messenger app. It's a great alternative strategy, but we were worried it would confound the above :) At least at first! Thank you for your thoughts! Would love to hear any further.
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Love the idea. To bad you need FB to login and use. Love to see other options also.
@buxx We chose Facebook-only account creation for our version one to keep things simple, but are open to accommodating for an alternative later on. :)
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@thekristikelly Understandable, it is very easy to implement. But a few more, Twitter of so, would be nice. And make an option to keep everything offline. So not affiliated with a online profile. The tool can be use for very personal stuff.
@einfalles Parents and children staying updated and connected has been a strong use case we've found so far! :) Let us know if you have any feedback from your experience!
YouHue
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