What's the point in the slider? Just show all 5 variants at once.
Also, great idea with the "Keep track" button at the end. Registration (and therefore conversion) becomes a part solving the user's problem ("How do I keep track of my work satisfaction?"). If it weren't for the slider, I'd definitely click it.
Thanks for your feedback. I must admit we did not experiment too much with different UI controls here. The continuous scale input with discretely triggered descriptors may be a bit odd to some - on reflection it is to me too!
The range of options that the slider offers is not equivalent to the options offered by just displaying the 5 variants - with the slider you can select a lot of values in-between variants.
Having said that, I'd prefer a keyboard-only way to do it too.
Developers also tend to spend quite a lot of time sitting at desktop-class machines with nice big monitors, because amazingly enough Emacs/IntelliJ/Visual Studio/whatever doesn't run on an iPad mini.
I kinda like the slider idea. There's no need for me to see the extreme options, it's enough to reason about whether the default case applies - if not I can play around with the slider. Exploration versus direct information is an interesting UI aspect I haven't really given much thought until now. Too much of the former and your UI looses discoverability (e.g. Office Ribbons). Too much of the latter and you overload your users with information (e.g. Eclipse Toolbar).
Also, one thing you could do that might be interesting: add the ability to set up or manage teams. That way it can be used for team retrospectives, just as Slack is now used for standups.
Perhaps tie it into Github (using organisations and/or repos as the basic units of projects, similar to how waffle.io does to give an agile view of projects.
Thanks for your feedback and ideas. We're certainly keen to add more features to the tool, qualitative feedback is definitely something put on the todo list.
How would you go about recording this? Freetext? Some kind of structured list of postive and nagative points?
Generally in most retrospectives, it's a collection of post-it notes which are put into positive, neutral and negative stacks. So, yeah, simple bullet point lists of positives, neutrals and negatives.
That said, it depends on how you intend for this to be used: is it just for personal monitoring, in which case you probably want it as simple and seamless as possible (and free text notes might be just the thing).
If it is for teams, eventually you probably want more structure.
It seems there is a lot of hunger for a tool like this that can be used in team mode.
With regards to recording positives/neutrals/negatives - I like this thinking. This could be something that the user could record at any point in time during the week, knowing that it is safely stored (and remembered) for their next upcoming retrospective. I always remember getting ready for retrospectives and retrospectively struggling to recall what really annoyed and pleased me. To try and counter this we put a 'box of emotions' in the middle of each workspace where anyone could put a sticky note when they felt something that they wanted to record for retrospective!
I love the idea, our company has recently been having work life balance discussions so this would be a great tool if:
1. The sliders are just bad. Make it a clickable 1-10 list of faces or just about anything else, really.
2. The descriptions are too specifically emotional. I'm stressed but not nervous, I didn't enjoy the week but it certainly wasn't tedious. Not a big deal but kind of jarring since that's the only info the slider provides.
3. Allow me to share with a limited team (on hipchat :-) and chart my team's progress. I'm not tweeting this info to my clients or facebooking to my friends and family ...
+1 to all of these. I was thinking the same points.
Additionally, speaking of work/life balance, it may make sense to have a question in there about having enough time to enjoy life or something along those lines. But maybe it overlaps enough with one or more of the other questions (i.e. stress).
Agree the slider needs some tweaks, or at least ticks. If I am in between two states do it affect things? Seems like I have to move pretty far over to move to the next "response."
I really love the slider, the fact that you can't see all options at once makes your reflection less automatic, you consider each one as you slide up and down.
I'm going to second this. I loved the slider and shades rather than a specific number. It gave me a way to guage where I felt like I was. I also liked that there was a description to say, hey this is what a 10 really is, don't just give a 10 because you want your job to be exceptional. In my case it helped me be more honest with myself (I'm a habitual 10 or 1 guy.
I've always found 1-10 choices to be a frustrating scale for things are subjective.
Rate your week, 1-10. I dunno, what is 1 even like? Are you asking me to compare to the worst possible week? Yeah, my week sucked, but I'm not in work camp or anything.
This has been the most straightforward way of asking this kind of question I've seen.
The site name immediately made me think of retrospectives [1]. Then I wondered about an online service for facilitating them along the lines of the American Arbitration Association's online mediation service [2] as an alternative monetization strategy to SEO/ads.
I like the concept of a slider, but the descriptions associated with the points on the slider may not be too accurate. I've had the textbook definition of a meh week - could have done more and didn't learn much. I'm not sure how should I indicate this on the slider.
You should also look at building some sort of integration with Slack, so that I can look at and gauge my team's moods and progress during the week.
The concept is indeed inspired from our collective experience of doing retrospectives in agile work environments. We think the process is very useful from both an individual and team perspective and we want to encourage more of it. A lot of the time though, the data collected at retrospectives is lost (written on sticky notes etc) and not stored for later use. From an individual, and possibly team, perspective this is something we are interesting in addressing.
I can't speak for anyone else but weeks just go by and I rarely remember back to some of the positives and negatives I had from 2+ sprints ago, nor do I remember if all of them were effectively addressed.
Retroospect, in its current iteration, is an attempt to give some way to record your personal feelings towards things that usually feed into the retrospective process.
I, for one, find a slider with the smiley face much better to use than 1-5 point bulleted scales.
For more constructive feedback, I would take another look at some of the descriptions. For example, I felt like I learned nothing this week, but having the lower values of that question be "I haven't learned a thing since the 90s" greatly escapes the bounds of the week. I get that it's exaggeration, but for what it's worth I adjusted my score so it was above that description even though it should probably be lower.
I haven't checked out every value available, but it's worth putting some metrics on each option and seeing if sub-ranges in one category are used far less often than equivalent ranges in other categories. It's funny how descriptions can muddle a statistic.
I think the question about stress could use some tweaks, to the wording. What do I say if there was stress and I handled it well. But I dont want more. Im not going to say "I could have more" and im not going to say "I got nervous". I could however say stress was med-high.
I like it. One thing it's missing is the lack of a way to add your own perception of how normal your week was - as an employee this is more stable, I guess, but as a business owner sometimes every week is a new bouquet and a new brickbat in one.
The variation between the middle "meh" feeling and the next level up is way too large of a emotional jump. There's a bunch of room between "no arguments" and "we had a blast." It might still be fine to have 5 or 6 detents in the slider, but those descriptions really threw me off.
I can see this being a really nice idea to use across a team, if such a thing was offered. A few use-cases / benefits:
* An agile team could use this as part of their retrospectives, and could track the data points across multiple sprints to see trends, as well as "scoring" the latest sprint.
* Sometimes an individual in a team can be quite quiet and reserved, and won't physically speak up if something's not going so well. Moving to a system like this may give them a voice.
* The levels can be tracked both by the team and by an individual's line manager to keep an eye on those people who are consistently (or increasingly) bored, frustrated, not learning, or generally unhappy.
* If this were completed every day, then it would effectively become a Niko-niko calendar[1] (although you might want to fill out just a single data point if you're doing it every day).
* Having a daily version would also work as an early-warning indicator of trouble brewing within a team or project.
I like the idea, but there is more than just my team that I have to deal with. This is suited to healthy startups I'm guessing, but enerprise, government, etc... all have external forces that can make this report very deceiving.
In the hands of individuals it's a good tracking tool: I wasn't really aware that I was... maybe not as happy at work as I would have liked until I took this week's survey. I'm interested in the historic data too, after I put a couple of data points in there.
In the hands of Management, let's just say I'm very wary. Management can use this data to improve a bad situation, ("You're unhappy because we schedule meetings every day at 3 and you can't get work done? Ok, let's stop doing that"). OR more likely, especially as companies grow bigger, can just make the situation worse: ("Let's have an awkward conversation about feelings and why you're not hyper happy this week / I'll blow smoke up your rear so you'll feel better, but those meetings at 3? Yeah, not ever going to change")
It is a service for tracking how you feel/think your work week went. We ask you 5 questions when you sign up, and then prompt you to complete this questionnaire every week. Over time, as you record more data points (about weeks of work) it provides insight into how your work life makes you feel/think and how that has changed over time.
It is heavily inspired by the process of agile retrospectives [1].
definitely! :) I enjoyed using your service! I just can't remember my email (it's been a few years) so i can't log in. But I decided to rejoin and possibly use it at my new company.
I'll go on record as saying I think the slider is a good idea. It's the subtle difference between picking from a pre-defined list at once versus exploring your feelings sequentially that makes it valuable. If as the weeks go on they change the wording so you don't always remember the answers it can be a way to consider each option without a bias towards another choice. If you see all options at once, you immediately compare them, if you view them sequentially you consider each one more independently. Perhaps this is a pointless distinction for some (and for some personalities I'm sure it is), but to me it's valuable to take time and process and explore my feelings, rather than choose as quickly as possible.
I disagree. The slider makes me jump between sliding and reading the value below. Since it's purely qualitative - I don't see anything wrong with discrete values.
There's also the opposite route; where you manipulate the face and not the slider.
I remember reading some article about it where I think there were two axis; love vs hate and weak vs strong emotions I believe and by moving over the face you would see the facial expression change and select it by clicking.
That could also be an interesting approach for this...
I think it is a good idea if it was a numeric scale rather than text-based. The problem with text is you move it, read text. Numbers are easy to process at a glance of 'low -> high' or 'bad -> good'.
The descriptions aren't "right" with what I'm trying to put down even if I understand which direction I'm moving the slider.
I'm basically treating it as a numeric scale anyway.
It would be awesome if this had a feature for you to group employees together, or to say what company you worked for.
I'd love to see how my entire team feels on a week over week chart. It should be anonymous to the employer, but it'd be cool to see the stats. But I'm a chart nerd.
Thanks for the comment. It's evident from the comments in this thread that a lot of people would get value from this. We'll be meeting and reviewing next iterations at the beginning of next week - this will be at the top of the list.
Being able to appear anonymous when sharing your data with team-member is somewhat debatable, I can see benefits on either side here. Ultimately I think if we do introduce this feature, and I strongly suspect we will, anonymity should be controlled by the user e.g. they can opt to share their name with team members or not.
I think having the possibility to not be anonymous would ruin it for the team. Some people might want to show how much they love the company (honest or not) by switching of anonimity. The anonymous group would thus become suspicious.
Another idea worth considering might be only revealing team evaluations once everyone has voted, or at least making them invisible for people who haven't voted, to avoid biasing the results.
if it's a choice it will soon become a non-choice since if some people on a small team decide not to be anonymous it will be obvious who is whom anyways.
If anonymity is optional there will also likely be some implicit pressure coming from management not to be anonymous, leading to people censoring their true feelings for fear of repercussions ("so, I've noticed for the past few weeks you haven't been happy or productive, maybe this is not a good fit for us")
Not sure, maybe I am being too negative, but when it comes to anonymity and workplace surveys my default setting is "the more the better"
Yes, I'd love to send a version of this to my team and ask them to fill it out on periodic basis. The choice to be anonymous would be good. I'm interested in the overall health of the team and to know if there are any negative outliers.
I'm very interesting in tracking team mood. We track ours daily (using https://moraleapp.com). Here is a graph of my team (10 devs) mood over the past six months or so:
What are you, middle manager, going to do about it?!
Just kidding, but I've had bosses in the past who would notice something like that, and attempt to correct by sending an email out suggesting that folks answer the survey with more happiness.
Well-intentioned or not on your part, I would quit my company if they required me to input my opinions into such a tool. With only 10 devs, it is instantly possible to match any downward trend to a specific individual based on keen observation, and then penalize (no raise, no promotion) or even fire/lay off that person for not "fitting the company's core values".
Because of the possibility for abuse, chances are high that some/many of the inputs are pure bullshit anyway - people saying they're happy when they're downright miserable, out of fear of being scoped out if they log negative results.
Just another management PR stunt so they can gloat about how happy their employees are, when the results may be fabricated. Perhaps this would work in a small company where downward trends in happiness result in immediate changes based on employee suggestions. For every medium and large sized company I've worked for, this would just be another manipulative game pushed onto employees by management who will never implement any real change but can show the CEO ridiculous charts about how "happy" the employees are.
tldr; Management loves to show off reports like these, but the values input are often meaningless and only serve to antagonize employees rather than help.
Ask me about my week on Friday - my answer depends entirely on what I'm doing that night. Out with the guys - it was a great week! Going home to do laundry - the week sucked. Way too many confounding variables in an emotional survey like this?
Its been shown in study after study, that people's response to surveys is extremely prone to suggestibility and situation. I remember a racial stereotyping survey with a movie afterward, where people who were told the movie was cancelled recorded as far less tolerant.
I like OP's idea a lot, however it will suffer from memory and social conditioning bias. This is why in Chronicle[1] I record these data points at the very moment they happen, and use the notion of "fold" to summarize them at daily/weekly/monthly level.
114 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadAlso, great idea with the "Keep track" button at the end. Registration (and therefore conversion) becomes a part solving the user's problem ("How do I keep track of my work satisfaction?"). If it weren't for the slider, I'd definitely click it.
Having said that, I'd prefer a keyboard-only way to do it too.
Interesting. in the mobile first world.
Microsoft Surface devices are mobile.
iPads with bluetooth keyboards are mobile.
Developers also tend to spend quite a lot of time sitting at desktop-class machines with nice big monitors, because amazingly enough Emacs/IntelliJ/Visual Studio/whatever doesn't run on an iPad mini.
If I rate what I learned this week at 0/5, it's labelled "I've not learned a thing since the early 90s". Cute, but not really the same thing.
Likewise, all the stress descriptions seem to be about workload.
Also, one thing you could do that might be interesting: add the ability to set up or manage teams. That way it can be used for team retrospectives, just as Slack is now used for standups.
Perhaps tie it into Github (using organisations and/or repos as the basic units of projects, similar to how waffle.io does to give an agile view of projects.
Interesting idea though.
Thanks for your feedback and ideas. We're certainly keen to add more features to the tool, qualitative feedback is definitely something put on the todo list.
How would you go about recording this? Freetext? Some kind of structured list of postive and nagative points?
That said, it depends on how you intend for this to be used: is it just for personal monitoring, in which case you probably want it as simple and seamless as possible (and free text notes might be just the thing).
If it is for teams, eventually you probably want more structure.
With regards to recording positives/neutrals/negatives - I like this thinking. This could be something that the user could record at any point in time during the week, knowing that it is safely stored (and remembered) for their next upcoming retrospective. I always remember getting ready for retrospectives and retrospectively struggling to recall what really annoyed and pleased me. To try and counter this we put a 'box of emotions' in the middle of each workspace where anyone could put a sticky note when they felt something that they wanted to record for retrospective!
1. The sliders are just bad. Make it a clickable 1-10 list of faces or just about anything else, really.
2. The descriptions are too specifically emotional. I'm stressed but not nervous, I didn't enjoy the week but it certainly wasn't tedious. Not a big deal but kind of jarring since that's the only info the slider provides.
3. Allow me to share with a limited team (on hipchat :-) and chart my team's progress. I'm not tweeting this info to my clients or facebooking to my friends and family ...
Additionally, speaking of work/life balance, it may make sense to have a question in there about having enough time to enjoy life or something along those lines. But maybe it overlaps enough with one or more of the other questions (i.e. stress).
The point isn't the specific number, it's the general placement. And even more, it's the trend over time/comparison to average.
Love the slider.
Rate your week, 1-10. I dunno, what is 1 even like? Are you asking me to compare to the worst possible week? Yeah, my week sucked, but I'm not in work camp or anything.
This has been the most straightforward way of asking this kind of question I've seen.
[1]: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-w...
[2]: https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionserv...
You should also look at building some sort of integration with Slack, so that I can look at and gauge my team's moods and progress during the week.
Thanks for the feedback/suggestions.
Bit of background:
The concept is indeed inspired from our collective experience of doing retrospectives in agile work environments. We think the process is very useful from both an individual and team perspective and we want to encourage more of it. A lot of the time though, the data collected at retrospectives is lost (written on sticky notes etc) and not stored for later use. From an individual, and possibly team, perspective this is something we are interesting in addressing.
I can't speak for anyone else but weeks just go by and I rarely remember back to some of the positives and negatives I had from 2+ sprints ago, nor do I remember if all of them were effectively addressed.
Retroospect, in its current iteration, is an attempt to give some way to record your personal feelings towards things that usually feed into the retrospective process.
For more constructive feedback, I would take another look at some of the descriptions. For example, I felt like I learned nothing this week, but having the lower values of that question be "I haven't learned a thing since the 90s" greatly escapes the bounds of the week. I get that it's exaggeration, but for what it's worth I adjusted my score so it was above that description even though it should probably be lower.
I haven't checked out every value available, but it's worth putting some metrics on each option and seeing if sub-ranges in one category are used far less often than equivalent ranges in other categories. It's funny how descriptions can muddle a statistic.
I think the question about stress could use some tweaks, to the wording. What do I say if there was stress and I handled it well. But I dont want more. Im not going to say "I could have more" and im not going to say "I got nervous". I could however say stress was med-high.
* An agile team could use this as part of their retrospectives, and could track the data points across multiple sprints to see trends, as well as "scoring" the latest sprint.
* Sometimes an individual in a team can be quite quiet and reserved, and won't physically speak up if something's not going so well. Moving to a system like this may give them a voice.
* The levels can be tracked both by the team and by an individual's line manager to keep an eye on those people who are consistently (or increasingly) bored, frustrated, not learning, or generally unhappy.
* If this were completed every day, then it would effectively become a Niko-niko calendar[1] (although you might want to fill out just a single data point if you're doing it every day).
* Having a daily version would also work as an early-warning indicator of trouble brewing within a team or project.
[1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...
In particular the point around quiet/reserved members of the team - this is certainly a medium that these people could be more comfortable with.
In the hands of individuals it's a good tracking tool: I wasn't really aware that I was... maybe not as happy at work as I would have liked until I took this week's survey. I'm interested in the historic data too, after I put a couple of data points in there.
In the hands of Management, let's just say I'm very wary. Management can use this data to improve a bad situation, ("You're unhappy because we schedule meetings every day at 3 and you can't get work done? Ok, let's stop doing that"). OR more likely, especially as companies grow bigger, can just make the situation worse: ("Let's have an awkward conversation about feelings and why you're not hyper happy this week / I'll blow smoke up your rear so you'll feel better, but those meetings at 3? Yeah, not ever going to change")
It is heavily inspired by the process of agile retrospectives [1].
Hope that helps clarify.
[1] http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile...
Eh. Why not? It's 2015.
Only reasonable explanation, right?
P.S We'll look into it.
I have some experience in happinesstracking as we do that for years in our company and I provide a similar web service for others. Some takeaways are:
- almost nobody wants to track every day
- many people want to track by events (something very good or very bad happened)
- it's more valuable, if you track a complete team or company and share the insight
- just ask for one metric, make all others optional
All the best for you guys, I love all the other people & services that do mood/happiness/satisfaction tracking/metrics.
I definitely agree with all your takeaways!
I remember reading some article about it where I think there were two axis; love vs hate and weak vs strong emotions I believe and by moving over the face you would see the facial expression change and select it by clicking.
That could also be an interesting approach for this...
The descriptions aren't "right" with what I'm trying to put down even if I understand which direction I'm moving the slider.
I'm basically treating it as a numeric scale anyway.
I'd love to see how my entire team feels on a week over week chart. It should be anonymous to the employer, but it'd be cool to see the stats. But I'm a chart nerd.
Being able to appear anonymous when sharing your data with team-member is somewhat debatable, I can see benefits on either side here. Ultimately I think if we do introduce this feature, and I strongly suspect we will, anonymity should be controlled by the user e.g. they can opt to share their name with team members or not.
Should it be opt-out of anonymity or opt-in?
If anonymity is optional there will also likely be some implicit pressure coming from management not to be anonymous, leading to people censoring their true feelings for fear of repercussions ("so, I've noticed for the past few weeks you haven't been happy or productive, maybe this is not a good fit for us")
Not sure, maybe I am being too negative, but when it comes to anonymity and workplace surveys my default setting is "the more the better"
Thanks
http://i.imgur.com/Pxla7fl.png (you might notice we had a really bad day in April, but quickly recovered)
What are you, middle manager, going to do about it?!
Just kidding, but I've had bosses in the past who would notice something like that, and attempt to correct by sending an email out suggesting that folks answer the survey with more happiness.
Because of the possibility for abuse, chances are high that some/many of the inputs are pure bullshit anyway - people saying they're happy when they're downright miserable, out of fear of being scoped out if they log negative results.
Just another management PR stunt so they can gloat about how happy their employees are, when the results may be fabricated. Perhaps this would work in a small company where downward trends in happiness result in immediate changes based on employee suggestions. For every medium and large sized company I've worked for, this would just be another manipulative game pushed onto employees by management who will never implement any real change but can show the CEO ridiculous charts about how "happy" the employees are.
tldr; Management loves to show off reports like these, but the values input are often meaningless and only serve to antagonize employees rather than help.
Its been shown in study after study, that people's response to surveys is extremely prone to suggestibility and situation. I remember a racial stereotyping survey with a movie afterward, where people who were told the movie was cancelled recorded as far less tolerant.
I like OP's idea a lot, however it will suffer from memory and social conditioning bias. This is why in Chronicle[1] I record these data points at the very moment they happen, and use the notion of "fold" to summarize them at daily/weekly/monthly level.
[1] https://github.com/srid/chronicle