Will Evans, principal, experience design for Twin Technologies, writes in a somewhat rambling post about the value of mood maps to document and map the emotional states of a user so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders while also informing the design process itself.
“It is important to remember that Mood Maps are an intermediate deliverable meant to provide meaningful insight into the creation of Personas, not a final artifact – and you may choose to never show these to key stakeholders, but only include them in the appendix of a findings document after the research phase is done. Another important point is that Mood Maps are best used for larger, more complicated user engagements or scenarios, not small directed tasks – logging into an application would not be an appropriate use of Mood Maps.”