Monthly Joy Recaps

Exploring your past memories is the best part of keeping a gratitude journal. I might even go so far as to say that the whole point of keeping a digital journal is all the unique ways of accessing past entries that it unlocks. Photos, tagging, collages - there are limitless options for a simple app to be a superpower for your memory.

I’m excited to introduce our latest feature for exploring your memories in Happyfeed: Joy Recaps.

How do they work?

Joy Recaps are a way to get a quick snapshot from any period of time, starting with monthly reviews. At the end of each month, you’ll be able to access an interactive overview of your moments. It’s a little bit like the Calendar* but more condensed and free for everyone.

• 📋 Open the Joy Recaps by tapping the clipboard icon in the top left corner of the main upload screen
• 📱 Swipe left and right or tap the month buttons to quickly change the current month
• 🍒 Your top emojis from the month (if any) will be displayed to the left of a ring chart showing the percentage of days you completed that month
• 📸 An image grid shows randomly selected photos from the month. Tap the shuffle button to randomly select new ones (over and over and over).
• ⚡️ Sharing is simple: Tap the Share/Save button to see options on how to share. You can also just use this button to save a screenshot of the grid.
• 🥑 Note: You can’t see the Recap for a month until it has completely finished. You’ll have to wait until March 1st to see February, for example.

It’s generally our philosophy to do the simple thing first and build more from there. If Joy Recaps are popular, you can expect many, many updates. Features like a word map or themes (e.g. “you mentioned food items a lot”) would be wonderful starting points. We’ll also look into smaller updates to how the image grid is used.

*The Calendar is currently only available to iOS users who subscribe to our Plus subscription.

How'd we decide on Recaps?

If you’ve been Happyfeeding for a while, you might notice that this new feature is very similar to our annual Gratitude Grid. Our motivation was a combination of two things:

1. We wanted a way to use the Gratitude Grid more freuqently. Why wait a full year to use this tool when there are plenty of memories and photos to explore from each month? By the end of 2021, you can expect to see the yearly Gratitude Grid in the app too.
2. For the past couple of years, we've been sending "monthly review" emails with random photos, top emojis, and most-used words. We wanted to move the reviews from email to an in-app experience. Email is a useful tool but for the sake of privacy and clutter-free inboxes, we’d rather avoid it. Plus, there’s a lot of extra feature’s we can access in-app!

Let's keep improving

Please try out the Joy Recaps and let us know what you think! We always really appreciate your reviews and love to hear your ideas and feedback via email. Just send us an email at [email protected].