At the last company that I worked for, my team used Scrum to manage our work. In Scrum, there are a few meetings that are held on a regular basis. One of these meetings is the retrospective. In the retrospective, the team discusses what went well and what could be improved.

I was the facilitator for these retrospectives and I would have everyone answer the two questions “What went well?” and “What could be improved?”. We would then discuss ideas for how we could address the things that could be improved. While the consistency of the questions was helpful to see improvement over time, I felt that we got into a rut with the process.

I am now working for another company where we still use Scrum. I am not the facilitator for the retrospectives. Our facilitator does a great job of keeping the retrospectives fresh. One of the things that she does is to find different sets of questions to ask.

One week, she asked us to think of one word to describe how we were feeling. She had the foresight to understand that some of us would have a hard time coming up with a word and shared this emotional wheel diagram to help us. I found the diagram to be very helpful due to the fact that I have a hard time coming up with words to describe how I am feeling. I have since used the diagram to help me describe how I am feeling.

While the wheel diagram is helpful, I also find it to be overwhelming with the number of words that are visible at the same time. I thought that it could be helpful to have a tool that would allow you to step through each layer of the diagram and only show the words for that layer. I built that tool and named it Emotive Words.

Emotive Words was written in Vue. It is a single-page application that uses Vue Router to manage the routes. The application is hosted on a Linux server running Apache. The application offers a diary feature that allows you to record how you are feeling each moment. The diary entries are stored in the browser’s local storage and can be exported to a JSON file.