Custom Rise Interactions that Feel Personal

A good custom interaction does more than ask learners to click something. In this Rise build, Maestro senior LXD Kendra Hutchings shows how playful visuals, tighter layouts, and a few purposeful interaction patterns can make a course about emotions really resonate with the learner.

Behind the Build: Custom Rise Interactions that Connect

The course is called Mind & Mood, and the topic is emotions and feelings. Kendra wanted to create something that could work for a younger audience, maybe middle schoolers, without making it feel childish or like an adult trying too hard to be “cool.”

That’s a narrow needle to thread. And it’s exactly where strong instructional design choices really matter.

Psst! To see the whole course, you can find it in the Really Good Rise Courses space in Maestro Community (MC).

Start with an audience constraint, not just a visual style#

Kendra’s first design decision was not “make it colorful.” It was: What would a 13-year-old actually want to see?

That audience lens shaped everything that followed. The course needed to feel:

• Playful, but not elementary
• Emotionally safe, but not overly soft
• Bold and expressive, but still readable
• Youthful, but not patronizing

That last point is easy to miss. Middle school learners are often more capable, perceptive, and honest than adults give them credit for. If a course feels fake, they’ll know. If it feels like it respects them, they’ll feel that too.

So instead of leaning into cartoon characters or overly cute mascots, Kendra moved toward a more abstract system: a colorful gradient line that loops, curves, and spirals through the course.

It quietly carries the metaphor: emotions rise, fall, twist, level out, and sometimes loop back on themselves.

Let your mood board run wild, then rein it back in#

Mood boards are a great way to explore potential visual directions for your course. But not every idea will be a winner. Weeding out those not-quite-right color palettes or visual motifs in the mood board stage will save you time in the long run.

One of Kendra’s early ideas for this course was to create little character representations of emotions, each with its own personality. Fun idea. But once Kendra looked at it through the middle-school audience lens, the characters started to feel a little too elementary.

That’s a useful reminder for any Rise project: the idea you’re most attached to may not be the idea that best serves the course.

The visual feel Kendra finally landed on kept the energy of the early exploration without relying on characters. The course uses:

• A bold, playful font that still feels easy to read
• Soft, high-contrast color combinations
• Gradient wave elements repeated across sections
• Abstract emotional movement instead of literal emotion characters

The result feels lively without becoming cheesy.

Use smaller layouts for a bigger impact#

One of the most interesting layout choices in this build is the use of smaller content widths.

The design almost starts to feel closer to a social media scroll: focused, stacked, and easy to move through. Perfect for a younger audience. But it can also work well in plenty of adult learning contexts. A narrow layout can make a course feel more accessible, especially when you’re working with short prompts, reflective questions, quotes, or scenario-based moments.

In Rise, this can be as simple as choosing blocks that support a tighter visual structure and setting the content width to small where it makes sense.

Keep native Rise pieces editable where you can#

The opening section uses a paragraph block with styled text and an uploaded image from Figma. The gradient line graphic was created outside Rise, then brought into the course as an image.

Kendra points out an important distinction here: some text is baked into the image, but it is not essential instructional text. It’s more like decorative or “fluffy” text that supports the visual mood. The core course content stays editable in Rise.

When you’re designing more visually ambitious Rise courses, it can be tempting to flatten everything into images because it gives you total control. But that creates tradeoffs for accessibility, translation, editing, and long-term maintenance.

Some practical rules of thumb:

• Keep essential instructional content editable in Rise whenever possible
• Use images for decorative brand moments, illustrations, or non-essential supporting elements
• Add alt text when an image communicates meaning
• Avoid baking in text learners must read to understand the lesson

Interaction 1: Mood Makers flash cards#

The first major interactive section is called Mood Makers: explore your six core emotions.

This section uses flash cards, styled to match the course brand. The cards introduce the core emotions in a simple, familiar interactive format before the course asks learners to do anything more reflective.

The sequencing here is intentional. Before learners can match emotions to experiences or rate emotional intensity, they need a shared vocabulary.

The flash cards do that job well because they are low-pressure. They let the learner explore terms, flip through ideas, and get comfortable with the course’s emotional language.

In the flow of the course, this section is followed by a continue button and a quote block that brings the visual system back in: wave elements, bold color, and subtle gradients.

Nothing feels like a one-off. The interaction, quote, and transition all belong to the same world.

Interaction 2: Mood Matcher reflection prompts#

The next custom interaction is Mood Matcher: match your mood to a moment.

In this section, the learner sees a set of emotions and can click any one of them. Then they complete a sentence-style response:

I feel proud when…

As the learner adds responses, the interaction tracks progress: one of five, two of five, and so on. Once five responses are completed, the next button unlocks.

Five is the requirement, not the limit. Learners can continue adding more responses if they want. Small design choices like this give learners more agency. They can do enough to move on, or they can keep reflecting if the activity is resonating.

For a course about feelings, this kind of open-ended reflection is much stronger than a simple multiple-choice check. It asks learners to connect the concept to their own lived experience.

Pro tip: To create this custom interaction, Kendra started with a visual concept of what she wanted the activity to look like. Then she used that image, along with a detailed list of requests, to vibe code the interaction using AI. After she had the code, she used the HTML block to embed it into her course and voilà! By giving the AI a visual reference first, she saved hours of revision time during the coding process.

Interaction 3: Mood Meter intensity scale#

The third custom interaction is Mood Meter: measure how strong you feel it.

This section presents scenarios one at a time and asks the learner to choose how strongly they feel in response using an interactive sliding scale. The visual design uses the same gradient language from the opening image, so the meter feels connected to the rest of the course instead of looking like a generic slider dropped into the lesson.

The scenarios are specific and age-appropriate. For example: “You finally sit down to watch a show and your Wi-Fi cuts out right at the best part.” On the slider, the learner can choose from one of four emotions, which progress in intensity the further to the right they are: unbothered; annoyed; frustrated; angry.

Each scenario starts with the continue button locked. Once the learner makes a selection, the button unlocks and they can move to the next scenario.

That locked-state pattern is useful because it creates a clear interaction contract: respond first, then continue. The learner is not being graded or corrected. They just need to participate.

Why these interactions work#

The strongest part of this course is that the interaction design and visual design are working together to solve the same problem.

The course is not colorful just to be colorful. The gradients, curves, and compact vertical layout all support the emotional theme. The custom interactions are not custom just to be impressive. They create moments where the learner has to name, place, and measure their own feelings.

That’s the difference between decorative interactivity and meaningful interactivity.

A few takeaways you can borrow for your next Rise course:

• Choose one clear audience constraint before you design the visual system
• Use a mood board to explore widely, then narrow down
• Consider a smaller content width when you want a tighter, more focused scroll
• Keep essential text editable in Rise, even if you use Figma for supporting graphics
• Make interactions feel connected to the course theme, not bolted on
• Let learners respond personally when the topic calls for reflection

A quick note on accessibility and brand#

Courses with lots of color and custom graphics need a little extra care.

Kendra mentions using soft colors with good contrast, which is especially important in a course like this. If color is doing emotional or instructional work, make sure learners are not relying on color alone to understand the activity.

For brand-heavy Rise builds, it is also worth checking:

• Text contrast on gradient backgrounds
• Whether decorative images need empty or descriptive alt text
• Whether essential text is editable and available to assistive technologies
• Whether buttons clearly communicate locked and unlocked states

The more expressive the design, the more important those fundamentals become.

The takeaway#

In Mind & Mood, the custom Rise interactions work well because they come from the learning goal. In this build, learners are not just clicking through a colorful course—they are connecting emotions to moments, intensity, and personal experience.

Try that lens on your next Rise project: before you add an interaction, ask what kind of connection you want the learner to make. Then design the click around that.

👉 If you want to explore more inspiring Rise builds, check out the Really Good Rise Courses catalog!