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AskNews: Seeking comments on an app to bring the "knob-style" feedback to the web

13 points by yellowbkpk ↗ HN
I just wrote a prototype for a "knob-style" immediate feedback system similar to what Nielson uses with small focus groups during major political speeches.

My goal is to try and get a small critical mass of users by tonight to use it during the VP presidential debate, polish it off and offer it to a larger audience for the last two presidential debates.

http://opinionslide.appspot.com/

7 comments

[ 36.8 ms ] story [ 836 ms ] thread
breck
Cool. Off the top of my head:

Can you make it move faster in response to holding down the arrow keys?

Maybe do a gradient instead of just a plain bar? Like, red on the left and green on the right?

I think vertical might work better than horizontal.

Maybe it should slowly return to the "resting" position. Otherwise

Ustream.tv has a feature you might want to look at called "Shout"....

breck
actually, ustream may have removed the shout feature, i don't see it anymore.
thorax
Yeah, I think it's important to have a gradient and maybe a big color block showing the color of the current "feeling".

What I'd love to see is not just an up and down. I'd like to see a "meaningless spin/rhetoric" side of the scale. Maybe it's just an extra button you hold down when you think something is meaningless banter.

I mainly want this so politicians will see that spin measured and after a few sessions of "99% spin" they'll work on getting their spin meters down into reasonable levels.

Another thought is to have half of the audience do "agree/disagree" sliders and the other half do "specific-answer/meaningless-spin". We need to call just as much attention to the latter as we do the former.

LogicHoleFlaw
I see a slide, and a scale from 0 to 100, but what do the different values mean?
yellowbkpk
I'm in the process of adding "WTF?" text right now, but the basic process is that the user sets the dial to their overall sentiment about the subject at any given moment. In the VP debate case: Do you like what the person on the screen is saying? How they are acting? Their response to the question?
jccovey
I like your enthusiasm about what is nothing more than a slider UI widget in jQuery.

Keyboard support, so users can tab to it quickly and position the indicator with the arrow keys (think about the HOME and END keys as well, for fast end-to-end motion), is a must.

Good proof of concept of what could replace the standard row of 3-5 radio buttons to capture how a user a feels.

yellowbkpk
I agree... the individual's contribution is nothing more than a jQuery slider, but the data collected from multiple people could potentially be useful.

I thought about using 3-5 radio buttons, but it's a lot harder to click on the little tiny radio buttons than it is to slide a slider.