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HappyOrNot terminals look simple, but the information they gather is revelatory
- bringtheaction 9y agoI love these terminals, and I almost always push the feedback button when I have been in a store where they have one.
- dingaling 9y agoI was leaving Lidl recently with my toddler and whilst demonstrating to him how to use the terminal I accidentally pressed the 'sad face'. There was a collective gasp from all the checkout operators, so I assume there is a direct impact to their performance rating. We pushed the super-happy face a few times to compensate.
- mcphage 9y agoIt seems like it would lose a lot of its effectiveness if the people at the store can see what you rate them.
- notimetorelax 9y agoNo, not really. I think it’s similar to NPS. It’s visible to the store clerks to allow them to correct their mistakes on the spot, instead of having to involve corporate teams. It’s the same idea as the one behind short development cycles. It gets you faster to the goal. And the ultimate goal for the company is to provide good service and not to have another way to evaluate employees.
- gowld 9y agoHow could store clerks correct or even understand their mistakes just by seeing a frowny push? The data most likely do go to corporate (which will return to the PoS as retribution), as evidenced by distress seen on the staff's faces when the frowny button was pushed. NPS is a disaster. Since it's directly tied to financial consequences for staff, (1) staff beg for 10s, (2) anyone who knows how NPS works and has a conscience always gives 10 in order to protect staff from maangemetn abuse.
- amenod 9y ago> How could store clerks correct or even understand their mistakes just by seeing a frowny push? Because they are humans? Doesn't everybody learn from their mistakes? Some are worse at it than others, sure, but that's what upper layer of data analysis is for...
- fenwick67 9y agoYup, classic Skinner Box stuff. A few quick zaps and the rat will learn pretty quick. But every day it will dread going into the box more and more.
- mseebach 9y agoThat's just cheap cynicism. There's also the positive reinforcement from being confirmed as having done a good job.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoI've worked as a store clerk. You don't get positive reinforcement for doing a good job. You just get yelled at if you screw up. Or somebody else screws up. Or nobody screwed up but the manager expects you to be superhuman.
- mseebach 9y agoThat's the point, if there's a HappyOrNot terminal, you do.
- nsgi 9y agoA frowny push doesn't tell you what mistake you've made, it forces you to guess what's going through the customer's head.
- jdmichal 9y agoI never understood why they even bother with 5- or 10-point systems when the only "good" signal is a 10. If that's all you want to collect, just ask me if I was happy or not. Don't give me a bullshit range and hope I know that only the most sparkling of reviews will save the employee I actually like.
- nitwit005 9y agoOne would imagine they could see the frown on your face, without needing to press a button to show the current state of what you're feeling.
- OkGoDoIt 9y agoThat’s my experience. Every time I go through Chinese immigration/customs they have these rating smiley buttons but even when my service has been slower than normal I never press the frown button because the person is right there in from of my face watching me. Too awkward.
- sdm 9y agoThe setup at immigration has it so the officer can't see what you pushed. Yes you can see them, but they don't know what you pressed -- at least at every Airport in China I've visited. This 4 scale smily face is pretty common in China, the started over 10 years ago. Even at places like banks and government agencies. They were a key part in how China got it's day to day corruption under control. People would pay bribes for service but leave a poor rating. And while corruption still exists in China, it is no where as in your face or omnipresent as it once was.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- new299 9y ago"that the most important information from any location comes from the number of frowny presses, which not even a dishonest employee would be able to undo." So possibly pressing the happy face doesn't compensate. The article also mentions that there's a reset delay to prevent people from pressing buttons repeatedly.
- jv22222 9y agoNow THAT is what professional PR looks like.
- ninkendo 9y agoYou could even say "this" is what professional PR looks like, since getting this on HN is certainly part of the PR as well.
- maxander 9y agoIn 2018, a reasonable person might suspect that this is what professional PR looks like, too, since a forward-thinking advertising firm wouldn't necessarily balk at hiring people to post nice things about it. :)
- taneq 9y agoIt's professional PR all the way down.
- IntronExon 9y agoNo no, at some point there still has to be a broad layer of tortoises or the whole thing collapses.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI was thinking of taking a Amazon IoT button (or particle photon since I found it again) and make it call a tech support line / inform IT if something is broken. Would other people be interested in a tutorial to how to do this?
- ravenstine 9y agoYes
- koala_man 9y agoThe Amazon IoT button quickstart guide is a tutorial for making the button send an email to an address of your choice, so arguably this already exists.
- mrintegrity 9y agoThey seem to me to be an efficient disease spreader, especially in flu season, I always press with the back of my knuckle for that reason.
- 13of40 9y agoThe only place I've run into one of these so far was leaving an airport bathroom, which is pretty much one of the last places I'd want to share a button with strangers. There's a reason those places typically don't have doors.
- k_sh 9y agoWas this in DFW? I saw this when I was passing through there last month, it didn't look like a HappyOrNot terminal but very similar
- koala_man 9y agoMakes sense for "somewhat happy" ratings, but I imagine that if you found the bathroom disgusting, you would still find some way to press that button.
- darkstar999 9y agoAs opposed to a door handle?
- ars 9y agoHard surfaces don't transmit disease effectively.
- jnordwick 9y agoMake the buttons out of copper or other antimicrobial surface?
- makecheck 9y agoI think they would make a lot more sense with foot pedals.
- yodon 9y agoIt there a secret sauce or barrier to entry here? This seems like an a weekend project to replicate...
- Topgamer7 9y agoYeah that's what I was thinking. I could replicate this with a knockoff rpi and some arcade buttons in like a day.
- jeromegv 9y agoYes. Will you hire a sales force to knock door on every store chain in the US to sell them on the idea? This isn’t about technical abilities.
- oftenwrong 9y agoDoing it at scale. Making the terminals. Selling the service to businesses. Deploying the terminals.
- cryptonector 9y agoSales is the hard part.
- suprfnk 9y agohttps://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
- tptacek 9y agoEven easier than smiley-face buttons is a Javascript metrics bug you can embed in different places on your website; most of us could hack that up in about 20 minutes. But we don't so much wonder why Mixpanel and Google Analytics are so popular.
- oftenwrong 9y agoThat's one of their offerings, actually: https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/web-smileys-2/ https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/web-smileys-2/
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoI still don't know what these things are- the only picture on mobile was a animation from an artist...
- rossdavidh 9y agoWe used to have this in society; it was the actual frowny or smiley face, like on your actual face. We gave them to each other all the time (well, maybe not in Finland). The problem now is that the people who get that information cannot do anything with it, because all of the power is too far up the hierarchy.
- koala_man 9y agoAre you saying that when a cashier asked, people didn't automatically smile and say "I'm fine, thanks" no matter how awful they felt the experience was?
- marcosdumay 9y agoWhen a store clerk was doing badly, somebody would tell him, because he would personally know many of his clients.
- slyfocks 9y agoUnless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense against malicious users. While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.
- lallysingh 9y agoOr a camera pointed at the button
- majormajor 9y agoLess invasive potential starting point: compare number of impressions with number of sales, look for suspicious outliers. More sophisticated options could be derived from similar easy-to-get numbers, too, like amount of foot traffic, door openings, etc.
- gowld 9y agoBut this would never happen, since the gimmick is to deploy a system to generate vanity metrics, not solve any problems.
- taneq 9y agoIf it's on a tablet, it probably has a front-facing camera taking snaps every now and then.
- vanderZwan 9y ago"Wow, you have a lot of happy customers who did not actually buy anything! Care to explain that?"
- hnal943 9y ago"kids"
- 9y ago
- swanson 9y agoI used to run an email based version of this aimed at tracking company/team mood. It was indeed frictionless and we collected a large amount of data (especially compared to annual employee surveys or every biweekly retrospectives), but it wasn't very actionable on it's own. The best outcomes we ever achieved were triggering a conversation. Helpful, but I'm not sure I would call it "revelatory".
- Falling3 9y agoThe timing of this for me personally is very interesting. I encountered and used one for the first time at IKEA yesterday. Their terminal was aimed specifically at customers' parking experiences, which makes me think they already know what kind of responses they're going to get.
- Splines 9y agoThat's interesting that they'd measure the parking lot experience. I wonder how they can change the parking lot experience to experiment with happiness levels. Route traffic differently through the different aisles? Provide shuttle services? Add distractions/things to read/music on the walk into the store?
- Falling3 9y agoYea, those are all really interesting suggestions! I assume they'll be trying some small changes to see how they affect the experience.
- tekkk 9y agoI have nothing against the terminals themselves; they serve a good purpose. It's just that the smileys somehow look a bit disturbing to me. Maybe I'm in minority but jeezs why did they have to go with so goofy looking faces. The very happy face especially looks like it has a hefty underbite. But happy to see them succeeding, I think giving customers a way to vent out after bad customer experience matters a lot.
- mrguyorama 9y agoHere we have a form of analytics that doesn't piss people off, because, as noted in the article, it makes it slightly more difficult than the standard javascript package to sell you more shit just because you wanted to let the store know they were not earning your business. I wish larger companies would take note
- majormajor 9y agoHuman interaction is both under- and over-rated by tech companies. On one hand, we spam the ever-living shit out of people with email ads, push notification ads, etc to try to generate engagement. On the other hand, we sometimes go out of our way to remove the human element from other parts of the loop: consider how rare it is to see a prominent "never ever recommend me this [show|song|book|whatever] again" button. With the massive number of potential features to choose from for finding similar pieces off content, I'd like to have more control there. Like a way to tell Spotify "I want my Discover Weekly playlist to only pull from songs that are less than 5 years old" or such.
- mrguyorama 9y agoSpotify actually does have a "Never recommend this song or this artist again" feature. If you click on the "No" symbol next to the heart in your daily mix or Discover weekly.
- lostconfused 9y agoThey still need a better overall algorithm. I often find myself in an imagined battle with the daily mix list clicking no to every song it suggests in an attempt to train it away from the endless stream of top 50 pop trash. Once it just stopped playing completely, I decided to take that as a minor moral victory.
- majormajor 9y ago> Spotify actually does have a "Never recommend this song or this artist again" feature. If you click on the "No" symbol next to the heart in your daily mix or Discover weekly. Ooh, thanks. The iPad app seems to be missing this... No heart, either. Now to google to figure out the heart vs the + button, too, hah.
- shem73 9y agoI run into these all the time in Finland. I have never actuated their buttons. I often have feelings about the quality of the establishment or the experience but they can never be expressed adequately by a 1-5 scale. I suspect the data gathered has a significant bias.
- koala_man 9y agoHow often do you email/review/message/tweet the establishment with your adequately expressed feelings?
- anilakar 9y agoBiased or not, it's the difference between the terminals, not the absolute ratings that matter.
- maxander 9y agoIt seems to mostly be about knowing "hey, there's a problem of some sort right around here," under the theory that once you know that, finding the solution is relatively easy. It works that way in debugging software, at any rate.
- taneq 9y agoThe thing that really annoys me is when the question doesn't match the way the data's used. My ISP asks for a rating out of 10 for "how likely would you be to recommend <ISP> to family and friends" after every support call, but the phone operators explicitly tell you that they're rated on the score that you give them. Those are two different questions - I'd like to rate the phone operator highly, the back-end technical administrators as average (they once assigned the same IP address to myself and another customer - it's disappointing that this is even a manual process!) and the ISP as a whole as 'could be improved' due to their lack of upstream bandwidth at peak times.
- cpeterso 9y agoI've seen HappyOrNot terminals in airports (typically at airport restroom exits: "How clean was the restroom?"). This seems like a terrible idea from a health perspective! These terminals could be a serious vector for spreading illness, especially for people leaving a dirty restroom in a high-traffic international airport.
- vanderZwan 9y agoNot much worse than a regular door handle, I expect?
- hnal943 9y agoI can't remember the last airport I was at where there was an actual door you had to open. Although that is probably more for convenience w/bags than cleanliness.
- marcosdumay 9y agoAt least around here, crowded places started removing door handles after the SAS epidemics on Asia. I am pretty confident it was because of health issues.
- sangnoir 9y agoI am assuming the airport had stalls with doors, and those doors had latches. I admit I don't travel very widely, but I'm yet to see hands-free stalls. It shouldn't be hard to order the sequence of steps such that washing your hands is your last activity before leaving the bathroom.
- hnal943 9y agoThat's true. I've seen these buttons at the Seattle airport, and they were positioned at the door. But that doesn't mean they would have to be there.
- kaskavalci 9y ago
- crankylinuxuser 9y agoA portion of this story reminded me of the "Story of Manna" by Marshall Brain regarding the automated fast food restaurant. These days, it would be very cheap and easy to wire up simple "HELP" buttons at all the trouble points in a restaurant, along with cameras and machine vision (other than cameras in the bathroom). And those sensors could create a synthesized view of a restaurant or department store, or whatever. The synth view can then inform where help is needed. But these sensors, low energy cpu's and radios are already attainable at the cheap. And at industrial productions, could be as low as $.50 per button. I'm really surprised why nobody has done this yet - and I read the article and found that yes they have. It's called HappyOrNot, and it's for surveys and quality control of every metric in 1 variable.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sschueller 9y agoHow long until these NB-IoT devices get hacked cause havoc?
- gaving 9y agoInteresting to see an article about this, I knocked together a React app the other month for my company based off questions from rands famous "Shields Down" https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-down-c291f015618f https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-down-c291f015618f using this method. https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not Never got around to analyzing the data, too scared.
- amenod 9y agoAre you kidding? Go take a look! Either you feel good about your company, or you get a chance to make it better - you win both ways!
- etimberg 9y agoThere is one of these in the grocery store near my house. The store has very long lines between 5 & 6 P and I noticed that the terminal conveniently disappears during that time. It's always there on the weekends though.
- keyboardhitter 9y agoThe interface is very friendly -- it's so simple that I find it compelling to use. A button press doesn't take any time out of my day or any data I wouldn't want to share. (Hopefully there are no strings attached e.g. video monitoring.) When they started appearing near my local pharmacy, it was placed next to a stand of toys with giant cute eyes, which drew my attention to the "matching" happy face. Nice job on strategic placement, I thought.
- diggan 9y agoReading the article, yes, you're leaving more information than you think (but maybe not more than you're willing to share). Video monitoring is mentioned in the article together with timestamping. A store had a "customer satisfaction" problem in the morning, so together with video footage, they could determine there was slow-starting employee who was at fault. > One client discovered that customer satisfaction in a particular store plummeted at ten o’clock every morning. Video from a closed-circuit security camera revealed that the drop was caused by an employee who began work at that hour and took a long time to get going. She was retrained, and the frowns went away.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoNever seen this before. Maybe this is evil of me, but I think it'd be super interesting to strictly vote "very unhappy" on everything. What kinds of changes do you think businesses would implement if people were still buying stuff despite claiming to feel very unhappy?
- onion2k 9y agoThe interesting data is whether or not the business is getting better or worse over time, so any outliers in the data probably wouldn't change anything at all. If they're not outliers then a policy of voting "very unhappy" regardless is just adding to weight of other very unhappy voices.
- taneq 9y agoThe problem with this is that once every vote is "10 or bust" your signal saturates and becomes meaningless. What they really need to ask, if you're right about what they want to measure, is "Was your experience today better / same / worse than last time?" And then they need to stop pushing for you to click "better" every time, "same" should be the usual response unless they've actually improved notably.
- isostatic 9y agoMentioned in the article about the Swedish shop - more sale she in the afternoon than morning, so what was the am team doing wrong. Turns out morning shoppers were happy, evening weren't (due to queues), and the way to increase happiness and revenue was more staff in the evening, rather than pushier sales in the morning.
- twooclock 9y agoI'd like to see a comparison of results of regular HON (where buttons are arranged bad to best) vs. the one with randomly positioned buttons vs. color only buttons (no smileys).
- stcredzero 9y agoThis seems simple, but it's actually very savvy. I don't have time to sit on an already long customer service call to answer a goddamn survey. I don't want to fill out yet another form on your gosh darn website. But let me mash one button on my way out? Hell yeah! Only too happy to vent or praise, if it literally takes a half second.
- sago 9y agoI agree. My first idle thought reading the article was "I could have done that.", My second thought was "I totally wouldn't, I would've made it way too complicated."
- username223 9y agoI recently visited some place with these stupid emoticon buttons, probably an airport restroom. They're the same as the Uber star system: press the smiley-est button or nothing at all.
- flyinghamster 9y agoJust on general principle, I wouldn't hesitate to jab the frowny face at a gas station with blaring "Gas Station TV" crap on the pump screens.
- wglb 9y agoI think this is very clever. There is a lesson in doing something so simple, as opposed to our engineering reflex to over-engineer everything. My first exposure to an effective business metric was my first consulting gig which was at Domino's Pizza HQ. Tom Monaghan was convinced that shorter delivery times led to increased sales. He had been unable to convince the franchisees of this, so he started a "Service and Delivery" program. Each month, secret shoppers would order pizza two different times, record the delivery time (starting when they hung up the phone) and rate the quality of the service. I wrote the program to crunch the numbers, sorting by sales, and sorting by delivery time. The two lists had a very high correlation. He published these lists each month in a company newsletter. When I started the process, the delivery time was like 34 minutes companywide, and a year later, the time had been reduced to 28 minutes average. The sales rankings validated his intuition. (The program had to be discontinued, after there was a lawsuit relating to a death caused in an auto accident involving a pizza delivery driver.) So the lesson here for us engineering types is, as patio11 says, is to find a way to do business value in what you are about to build.
- herald17 9y agoHi can any statistician help? How many samples are we supposed to collect? Would this solution work in small boutiques where only you get 4 or 5 samples a day?
- joncalhoun 9y agoOne issue with these is that they don't always ask you to rate what you expect. For instance, my local Walmart has one with a small sign above asking you to "rate your experience with self checkout" yet everyone who checks out with a cashier uses the button assuming you are resting any checkout experience.
- johnchristopher 9y agoI will not stop pushing the happy face on these fucked-up orwellian totems piece of alienation s*.