I wanted to create the most honest diary possible. Some say that people lie even in their diaries. I was sometimes that kind of person myself, and especially when it comes to personal reflections, people tend to write only the good things or sugarcoat bad things when posting on social media. My primary motivation was to create a space to record truly trivial thoughts or events—things you might casually jot down on the back of a receipt, a napkin, or the corner of a notebook and forget—rather than just a diary for myself. That is why it was important that emotions be read, rather than something I choose to record. When you write a diary entry in this app, it reads the emotion words written in the entry and visualizes your feelings for the day using colors. My goal was for these daily entries to accumulate, allowing me to track my emotions on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In the MVP, since the app reads emotions by matching them to its existing dictionary, the key was to start with as many emotion words as possible.
I start by creating a spreadsheet titled "Emotion System." Whether planning a trip or preparing for a wedding, I always began by creating a spreadsheet table. Once I structured the table and filled it in one by one, I began to see where to start and how to proceed. Since I couldn't assign colors to every single emotion word, I began by dividing emotions into broad categories. Initially, I established about 16 categories, including not only joy, satisfaction, excitement, and anticipation, but also anxiety, depression, worry, sadness, and anger. Within each category, I collected specific words such as "happy," "excited," "funny," "feeling good," "crazy," "furious," "furious," "turtle," and "daunted." By reviewing my past diaries and entries related to emotional perception, I confirmed that there were a significant number of reactive emotions—such as surprise, embarrassment, and bewilderment—in addition to the categories listed earlier. I then organized these into a final set of 20 categories. Afterward, I repeated the process of collecting words that fit each category. Naturally, there were many words that overlapped across categories. The emotion of "excitement" falls under excitement or anticipation, but it can also be a feeling of joy. The same goes for nervousness. It belongs to tension, but it can also be a feeling of anxiety. Since most emotions are in a similar direction, it didn't seem like it would be a major problem even if an exception occurred, but it could still be recorded as a completely different emotion. For now, we are continuing the test with a logic that uses the top two emotion categories with the most mentions for visualization.
Ultimately, the biggest problem is context. That is the challenge... As the saying goes, you have to listen to the very end in Korean. And I suppose I should also consider how it would naturally translate into another language... I don't want to think too deeply about it yet; I'm just going to manage somehow... That's how it is for now... They say there is no such thing as a perfect MVP.