Childrens moods, made clear

A parent focused iPhone app designed to help diagnose mental health issues in children & adolescents

COMPANY

MoodHaven

ROLE

Founder, Indie Project

EXPERTISE

Branding, Design, Engineering, Website, Video

YEAR

2025

Project Description

Purpose built for my own needs supporting my 7-year-old son with uncertain mental health issues, I built MoodHaven to help him get the diagnosis he needs to succeed.

Timeline

From explorations to app store approval in 2 months (side project) while working full-time at GameGlass

Background

A parent-first mood tracker designed to bring clarity, peace of mind, and support in the journey of child and adolescent mental health.

Parenting a child or adolescent with mood challenges can feel overwhelming. MoodHaven makes it easier.

Quickly log moods, incidents, sleep, medication adherence and notes. Discover patterns over time. Create a team and log together. Share clear reports with clinicians when needed.

Process

This category details the step-by-step approach taken during the project, including research, planning, design, development, testing, and optimization phases.

Research & Planning

Wrote down problems facing my individual needs and researched existing solutions for viability and lacking features.

Conducted market research to additional needs outside of the ones I faced individually. Defined target audience segments and outlined key features based on user needs and market trends.

Design & Prototyping

Prototyped initial designs using Figma. These were explorations used to discover design patterns and structure for the application, as well as defining the brand/app style. After these explorations were completed I proceeded to code prototypes to emulate actual functionality.

Development & Implementation

After defining a list of requirements, I started developing the product using the following tools and libraries:


  • Xcode

  • Cursor

  • Github

  • Swift + SwiftUI

  • Claude 4.0 Sonnet + OpenAI Codex

  • Supabase

  • Clerk

  • RevenueCat

  • Posthog

  • Rive

  • Sentry

My approach was to include minimal libraries to make sure I was focusing on speed and take advantages of native functionality. When design was needed, I would create polished designs in Figma as individual components, and then allow Claude to reference these images when creating UI using Swift. After basic implementation and functionality were in, I'd refine the styles myself directly in code.

Once functionality was completed, I used Codex to review individual sections of my code to maintain security, performance and code quality best practices and then cross-referenced these results with a high context version of Claude.

While I was doing all of this, I would work on the website using Framer to make sure I was utilizing my time effectively.

Post Implementation

Once the application was finished, I focused on marketing and promotional material for both the hackathon I entered, as well as the app store page. This included product screenshots, a promotional video and a live demo of how the product works.

Screenshots were done in Figma, the promotional video in After Effects and the demo was done using Screen Studio.


Results

The resulting parent first mood tracking application offers a seamless user experience, allowing individuals and teams of caregivers to create a diagnostic paper trail.