MoodGarden
“It looked beautiful-until it didn’t.”
-MoodGarden UX Designer
The Concept
MoodGarden was envisioned as a gentle digital companion- an app that would visualize a user’s emotions as living plants, growing or wilting based on their daily mood entries. Each day, users could log how they felt and watch their virtual garden reflect their emotional patterns in real time. Happy days made blossoms appear; anxious or low-energy days caused leaves to fade and droop.
The idea was to turn mental health tracking into something less clinical and more personal- a space that rewarded mindfulness with beauty. Instead of charts or graphs, MoodGarden used organic, shifting shapes that mirrored natures unpredictability. Users could zoom out to see their “emotional climate” over time or focus on a single plant representing a specific emotion.
Its creators described it as “a mindfulness tool that grows with you”- part meditation aid, part emotional diary. For a brief moment, the concept drew attention from wellness startups and digital art communities alike, praised for its poetic simplicity and calming visuals.
Why It Was Scrapped
Despite its charm, MoodGarden’s downfall was rooted in its emotional realism.
The app required consistent daily check-ins, but most users began skipping entries after a few weeks. The result? Gardens that stopped growing or, worse, visibly wilted-a feature intended as feedback that instead felt like guilt.
Early users reported feeling sad or anxious when they opened the app after neglecting it, describing their withered gardens as “emotional punishment”. Others said the slow decay of their virtual plants mirrored real-life burnout, making the app difficult to return to.
Technically, the app demanded complex data syncing and mood-prediction algorithms that often misfired, producing strange or mismatched plant behaviors. Over time, what was meant to be soothing became unpredictable, occasionally turning a user’s entire garden brown overnight due to a minor data glitch.
By the end of testing, the developers realized that while they had succeeded in giving emotions a visual form, they had also made them impossible to escape. The project was quietly discontinued- its final update titled “A Moment of Stillness”.