howWEfeel

Inspiration

howWEfeel was built to become a library of global emotions, where we can track daily feelings as a collective. While there are multitudes of resources available for tracking personal emotions over time, there are few tools for engaging with global emotions as a community. This site fills that gap.

What it does

The website opens to a prompt: "How do you feel today?" This question is answered daily by every user who enters the site, and the responses populate the screen with colorful bubbles. Each color corresponds to an emotion, bundled under three main types--happiness (yellow), sadness (blue), and anger (red). As more users respond throughout the day, emotional trends become visibly clear based on this color coding.

The site also has a page for tracking individual user responses over time. Instead of presenting global responses per day, this page displays every emotion the current user has expressed since creating an account. This space is intended to fulfill the role of personal journaling, encouraging emotional awareness as the number of entries grows.

Finally, the site provides a page for navigating historic data, where users can view daily entries from any day in the past. With this tool, it is possible to measure emotion positivity over the week, compare major global events with global emotions, and, with time, observe emotional trends over a scale of years.

How I built it

howWEfeel is a simple website built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript only. Data and authentication management is done using Supabase! I am currently hosting it alongside my personal website using cPanel.

Challenges I ran into

One of my top priorities was to make this site simple, calming, and aesthetically pleasing. I needed to ensure a high level of cleanliness while sustaining all of my desired pages and features. I am most proud of my emotion text display format. I knew I didn't want to display text by default, but I also knew that it would be impossible for users to understand what each bubble color represented without it. My solution was to display emotion text while hovering over a bubble, and I think it turned out quite clean and even cute!

What's next for howWEfeel

So far, I have accomplished my goals to display collective and personal emotions. A very large part of my vision, however, was the ability to use this site to track communal trends in emotion. Currently, this is possible by navigating through single days. From here, I intend to add an "Insights" page, where trends like "average emotion positivity" and "most common emotion" can be visualized over time.

Built With

• html/css
• javascript
• supabase