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> no complicated forms or sliders. I find this very interesting. What made you want to avoid use a slider? Personally, I really dislike such limiting options.

> no complicated forms or sliders. I find this very interesting. What made you want to avoid use a slider? Personally, I really dislike such limiting options. Good, meh, bad? It doesn't let me express if I'm a little better than good or somewhere between Good and Meh. I'd often have to truncate my true expression. For myself, I would love a single simple slider. It would let me express myself with any degree of accuracy I want. Very specific, or just rough. Am I an exception from the average user? Because this bugs me in so many places. So many things are in or out. I want them to be a floating point value between 0 to 1. Website favourites. I wish I could favourite them by any amount between 0 to 1, etc. (Then you could do all sorts of things like display the higher-ranked items larger, or filter displaying only >= 0.75 items). Same goes for app/movie rankings. Why do I have to truncate my feelings to 1-5 stars instead of just dropping a slider to where I feel like?

swanson 14y ago
My take is that when you use a slider - or the common 5-item Likert scales (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) - people will waffle over their answer. The fewer the options, the lesser cognitive overload of having decide is today a "great" day or just a "good" day. I don't want answering the question "how is your day going?" to take more than the 2 seconds it takes to move your mouse to the link. The problem with the slider is that you have you interface with it. So the workflow would be: get an email, click a link, move a slider (compared to get an email, click one of 3 links). I know I'd want to avoid the extra step as a user, so that's why I opted for that approach. There is also an option for the user to enter an anonymous comment after they have logged their mood - so if you want to express why today is bad or add note that it is an especially excellent day you can do that. At a higher level view, I think the value in this particular app is not a scientifically rigorous computation of a teams mood, but rather as a conversation starter ("why has there been a few 'bads' this week? let's talk about it") and a general trend indicator ("morale is down since we moved to the new office, what's up with that?").
- shurcooL 14y ago
  Yeah, I think having more options (like 5-item Likert) would be worse for exactly the reasons you mentioned. It's a good point that you can't do a slider in email, I didn't think of. Unless email allows embedding an html form that you can submit? I've never seen anything more than static html in my email so I guess it must not be possible. Anyway, thanks for your explanation, it makes sense. I think I'll make myself a 0-1 floating point favourites tracker and see how I like using it.
  - swanson 14y ago
    Yeah, forms in an email are tricky. Some clients actually do support them - which was a big surprise to me! http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/ Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
pjungwir 14y ago
> What made you want to avoid use a slider? I built a political survey app once, and we started out using sliders to measure both (1) issue importance and (2) agree/disagree. It was way too fiddly, and no one cared about degree of accuracy. Every iteration of the UI we gave the user fewer choices. By the end I was pushing for just "agree" and "disagree" or even "agree" and "next question," but we never took it quite that far.

swanson 14y ago

My take is that when you use a slider - or the common 5-item Likert scales (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) - people will waffle over their answer. The fewer the options, the lesser cognitive overload of having decide is today a "great" day or just a "good" day. I don't want answering the question "how is your day going?" to take more than the 2 seconds it takes to move your mouse to the link. The problem with the slider is that you have you interface with it. So the workflow would be: get an email, click a link, move a slider (compared to get an email, click one of 3 links). I know I'd want to avoid the extra step as a user, so that's why I opted for that approach. There is also an option for the user to enter an anonymous comment after they have logged their mood - so if you want to express why today is bad or add note that it is an especially excellent day you can do that. At a higher level view, I think the value in this particular app is not a scientifically rigorous computation of a teams mood, but rather as a conversation starter ("why has there been a few 'bads' this week? let's talk about it") and a general trend indicator ("morale is down since we moved to the new office, what's up with that?").

shurcooL 14y ago
Yeah, I think having more options (like 5-item Likert) would be worse for exactly the reasons you mentioned. It's a good point that you can't do a slider in email, I didn't think of. Unless email allows embedding an html form that you can submit? I've never seen anything more than static html in my email so I guess it must not be possible. Anyway, thanks for your explanation, it makes sense. I think I'll make myself a 0-1 floating point favourites tracker and see how I like using it.
- swanson 14y ago
  Yeah, forms in an email are tricky. Some clients actually do support them - which was a big surprise to me! http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/ Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

pjungwir 14y ago

> What made you want to avoid use a slider? I built a political survey app once, and we started out using sliders to measure both (1) issue importance and (2) agree/disagree. It was way too fiddly, and no one cared about degree of accuracy. Every iteration of the UI we gave the user fewer choices. By the end I was pushing for just "agree" and "disagree" or even "agree" and "next question," but we never took it quite that far.