12 ms·

Show HN: Retroospect – How was your work week?

221 points by hunglee2 11y ago

bargl 11y ago
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.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  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.
  - mlrtime 11y ago
    How about a check box to opt-out of being anonymous? Some team members might want to let their manager know their individual stats.
    - GordyMD 11y ago
      Tick box sounds good. Should it be opt-out of anonymity or opt-in?
      - mlrtime 11y ago
        opt-out of anonymity in my opinion, always default to the safe choice. As your application grows you can make this a setting the manager decides.
      - rogerbraun 11y ago
        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.
  - phreeza 11y ago
    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.
    - GordyMD 11y ago
      Like this idea too - kind of like how sprint estimation should be done when using poker cards.
  - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
    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"
- mlrtime 11y ago
  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. Thanks
walbell 11y ago
Great job!
exizt88 11y ago
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.
- tommorris 11y ago
  Agreed on the slider.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  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!
  - exizt88 11y ago
    I did register for Workshape, though. So, I guess, your little project served its purpose in my case after all :-)
    - GordyMD 11y ago
      Ahh, busted!
- liviu- 11y ago
  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.
  - mkagenius 11y ago
    > I'd prefer a keyboard-only way to do it too. Interesting. in the mobile first world.
danohuiginn 11y ago
There's a problem having a five-point scale with light-hearted descriptions attached to each point. 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.
tommorris 11y ago
Track qualitative feedback too. 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.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  CTO of Workshape.io here. 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?
  - tommorris 11y ago
    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.
    - GordyMD 11y ago
      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!
Ensorceled 11y ago
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 ...
- jader201 11y ago
  +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).
- liviu- 11y ago
  Seconded 2. I'd rather have no explicit descriptions of what each mark should reflect, as I'd prefer to make up a scale of my own that fits my needs.
- zacharycohn 11y ago
  Fwiw, I love the slider. I don't have to think "was today a 7 or an 8?" Instead I just throw the slider to a "pretty high." 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.
- topherjaynes 11y ago
  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."
- roneesh 11y ago
  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.
tfeldmann 11y ago
I really like the site! Please provide an API or at least an export functionality in the long run. I'd hate to see another service I use disappear.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  We will be providing an API in the future for sure.
brudgers 11y ago
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. [1]: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-with-linda-rising/ http://www.se-radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-w... [2]: https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionservices/mediation https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionserv...
trequartista 11y ago
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.
GordyMD 11y ago
CTO of Workshape.io here. 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.
- krisdol 11y ago
  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.
- ripter 11y ago
  Keep the slider and faces, it's the best part of the UI. If it was one of those lame pick a number things, I wouldn't have done it.
stephen123 11y ago
I really like the idea. 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.
taneq 11y ago
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.
xbryanx 11y ago
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.
timblair 11y ago
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. [1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood-with-a-niko-niko-calendar/ http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...
- GordyMD 11y ago
  Thanks for your comment - spot on. In particular the point around quiet/reserved members of the team - this is certainly a medium that these people could be more comfortable with.
keslag 11y ago
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.
- rpwilcox 11y ago
  I too like the idea, and am of two minds of this. 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")
bengale 11y ago
I've been working on something like this myself, there are no new ideas under the sun I guess!
mister_m 11y ago
Can I get an explanation of what this is before I sign up? There is a sentence on the homepage, but it tells me next to nothing.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  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]. Hope that helps clarify. [1] http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile-retrospective http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile...
  - mister_m 11y ago
    It does; thank you.
shocks 11y ago
> Password can't contain spaces Eh. Why not? It's 2015.
- PMan74 11y ago
  Conservation efforts, hike Helium there's a finite amount, we're hitting Peak Space. Only reasonable explanation, right?
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    ^^^ What he said! P.S We'll look into it.
    - shocks 11y ago
      Ha! Thanks. : )
- gknoy 11y ago
  My users.txt is space delimited. ;)
  - chaqke 11y ago
    That would cause usernames with spaces to overwrite passwords ;-)
nsxwolf 11y ago
Share on Facebook? No.
- totalrobe 11y ago
  Go wild. Share on linkedin.
antjanus 11y ago
Reminds me a lot of Happiness Metric: https://www.happinessmetric.com/ https://www.happinessmetric.com/ I used them for a long time.
- superbilk 11y ago
  awesome, you still remember us :-) (I'm the founder of happinessmetric.com and antjanus and me had some conversations in the past about features) 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.
  - antjanus 11y ago
    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 definitely agree with all your takeaways!
roneesh 11y ago
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.
- tamersalama 11y ago
  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.
  - mtrimpe 11y ago
    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...
- fweespeech 11y ago
  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.
- applecore 11y ago
  Agreed. The slider makes clear the spectrum of possibilities.
lighthawk 11y ago
Nice! How will it be monetized?
swanson 11y ago
I'm very interesting in tracking team mood. We track ours daily (using https://moraleapp.com https://moraleapp.com). Here is a graph of my team (10 devs) mood over the past six months or so: http://i.imgur.com/Pxla7fl.png http://i.imgur.com/Pxla7fl.png (you might notice we had a really bad day in April, but quickly recovered)
- dimino 11y ago
  Happiness on your team is trending downwards. 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.
- Retr0spectrum 11y ago
  What happened on the bad day, if you don't mind me asking?
  - prottmann 11y ago
    To know this use http://teamspir.it http://teamspir.it - Logbook for Teams
  - swanson 11y ago
    Had a challenging week working with an offsite team that just came to a boiling point.
- developer1 11y ago
  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.
jnicholsoniname 11y ago
I would pay for this if I could use it for my team, preferably daily.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
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.
- sridca 11y ago
  Ah, finally someone said it. 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 https://github.com/srid/chronicle
arobertson 11y ago
May I recommend a similar self hosted journaling application: https://www.trailmix.life/landing https://www.trailmix.life/landing https://github.com/codecation/trailmix https://github.com/codecation/trailmix
rpwilcox 11y ago
I like it. The sliders are great, especially showing emotions in the spaces between states: "I'm not quite angry mad, but my :-| face is reasonably red". I would like a free form text field, a more like, "What's bothering you this week?". Some things can't be expected / measured by sliders, but may be important to a person to note historically.
andygcook 11y ago
One of my coworkers actually created a system to do this manually in Google Docs almost a year ago. This post was a gentle reminder to me that there are always other smart people working on almost the same exact idea as you. Also a reminder that usage is like oxygen for a startup. He never actually built out the product, but proved demand manually using Excel. he should have built this - I'm glad someone did though and great execution Retroospect.
alexgaribay 11y ago
Icons in Safari aren't lined up like they should be compared to Chrome.
- GordyMD 11y ago
  Thanks, we'll get this addressed.
sagivo 11y ago
I will be happy to get aggregated info based on company/country/day etc..
aayala 11y ago
Sometimes your job depend on others I don't see that options like (block by other team(S))
agotterer 11y ago
This is a brilliant project for workshape. For those who aren't familiar they are building a platform with a new approach to recruiting . What better way to target potential candidates then to already knowing how happy or unhappy they. Well played!
- GordyMD 11y ago
  Thanks! The bigger picture for us, with Workshape.io and Retroospect, is really about understanding how happiness and work sit together and helping individuals, groups, and companies get access to this information in a format that can be used to make better decisions. Whilst Workshape, right now, is a recruiting platform for companies who need to hire developers, we think its application is much bigger. We are looking into how to go about next steps to move into other areas and make it useful even if you aren't currently seeking a new challenge. Hopefully this would make Workshape and Retroospect very complimentary.
pretzel 11y ago
Just throwing this in here - we already do this at my work with a thing called office vibe [1]. Everyone seems to like it . [1] https://www.officevibe.com https://www.officevibe.com
eatitraw 11y ago
Anyone else have problem signing up? The forms just don't work. I press "Sign up" but nothing happens EDIT: now they've sent me 8 welcome emails. Hmm
elfchief 11y ago
The signup form definitely has some user experience fail in it. I give an email address and password, click the "sign-up" button, and... nothing. Absolutely nothing. No page load, no progress indicator, nothing. Pull up developer tools, turns out there is actually a POST going on behind the scenes, which is getting a 503. So, there's probably overloaded servers, but it should would be nice if that were exposed anywhere besides the developer console...
- GordyMD 11y ago
  Yea. Just hit the limits of a single dyno in Heroku! :/ Issue should now be resolved.
  - rocky1138 11y ago
    It's important: did the underlying problem get fixed (not displaying an error on a 503) or is it "resolved" only by throwing more hardware/resources at it?
    - GordyMD 11y ago
      The problem was fixed - we found the root cause of API becoming unresponsive and returning 503 responses and then fixed the issue. The issue was to do with the averages endpoint re-calculating every time it was called, this ate up alot the resources on the dyno - we've cached this now so this no longer happens. It is still running on the same resources, no 'throwing' more anything at it at this point.
webmonkeyuk 11y ago
I'm a lazy user and you lost me at the "sign-up" process. Would be great if it was possible to auth via Google, Facebook
- riffraff 11y ago
  ditto, google/twitter/facebook/github are all ok for me, just don't make me type my email again.
  - davidjnelson 11y ago
    Prefer google auth too myself, but a nice workaround is the text expansion feature in iOS where if you type in the first three letters of your email it auto fills the rest.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  There's no way to win this. Include social media signin, the "ZOMG PRIVACY" crowd yells at you. Don't include them, and the "ZOMG EMAIL ADDRESS" crowd yells at you. Not directed at you specifically, but people waste more time complaining about signin options than actually going through the process. It's kind of funny.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    You can do both.
mathattack 11y ago
Would it be feasible to have this all on one page to easily and quickly fill out? It's clearly a 1st prototype, so I'll cut a lot of slack on the mechanics. Overall it could be a great way for medium and large companies (where it's impossible for everyone to talk to everyone every day) to understand the sentiment of their people. Keep going with this, please!
dotsamuelswan 11y ago
For a company that matches employees to employers, this is a pretty brilliant passive way of saying "Hey, look at how unexciting or terrible your job is, we can help!" Personally, I was neutral across the board. Instantly had me thinking "should I be poking around for a new gig?", even if responsibilities/life make that somewhat unpractical.
mrmondo 11y ago
Any reason you don't have SSL / HTTPS on the registration page? Feels a little risky entering details on a form without SSL these days.
zackbleach 11y ago
Great job.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mooreds 11y ago
I signed up. Seems like a good idea. However, I've tried to do this kind of thing in the past, with a spreadsheet on my phone. Just ended up forgetting/deciding not to do it, even with a calendar reminder. Will be interesting to see if the graphs and email reminders are enough to push me over the hump this time and give enough data to make it useful.
dockd 11y ago
The fact that people are very passionate about the slider means you're onto something. (Wish I could find the story about how it's better to have a few people who really love your product than a bunch who simply like it.)
groby_b 11y ago
Try two-dimensional selection. E.g. instead of just a "stressed" slider, have a grid with X-axis of "workload" (low to high) and Y-axis of "pressure". Or "anxiety". See here for an example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emotionsense&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emo... It's surprisingly intuitive, at least for the axes the devs of that app have chosen.
tonylemesmer 11y ago
Cuban council's moodstats[1] is an app that I wish was still available. 90's pixelpushing in the extreme but still pretty nonetheless. It allowed you to track several subjective metrics over time. With these mood tracking apps however the outcomes are probably simple aren't they? If you're not happy at work whatcha gonna do? Get a new job or have an argument with your boss. [1] http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/moodstats http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/moodstats
kevin 11y ago
Odd to see so many people focus on the slider. I don’t really care about the slider--meaning I'm neutral on it. What I do like is your copy for describing the sentiments. I threw the slider back and forth just to see all the options. Unlike other surveys, it felt like it more accurately resonated with me over other likert scales: http://allpsych.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/likertscales.gif http://allpsych.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/likertscales.... I think that made the biggest difference on getting people to contribute. It felt like the data was going to represent me. This is probably a small experiment, but if you’re thinking about this mini-site as a form of lead generation for WorkShape…then your main goals should be around getting people’s credentials and having it spread to their coworkers. I would highly recommend figuring out how to give people accounts without passwords needed up front. It should feel almost like a mailing list at the end of the survey… “Thanks! Let us know your email and we’ll check back in on you next week.” Bonus points if you explain clearly why tracking this weekly is good for them. Then in your confirmation email, you can say you generated a password and you can follow their stats over time through this login link. Your secondary goal should be explicit as well (if it’s what I think it is). “Want to track how your entire team is feeling this week? Send them a link.” Repeat on telling them why that’s a great idea. Right now, everything seems a little too subtle. Of course, I know you were probably just whipping this up to get it out the door. Again, the copy is the best part of this site. If you change anything on the interface, be sure to leave that alone. Good luck taking this further!
- GordyMD 11y ago
  Appreciate the comment and time taken to write this. We do quite like the labels too, but I do recognise, as pointed out by others, that their presence could create a form of bias. I believe that the choice of wording could divide the audience, with some people connecting with the sentiment of each and some people not. The concept of the survey is a neat idea, and could be a good thing for us try out. The suggestion of adding in a prompt for inviting team members is also good, if we decide to go down that route. Thanks again!
johnmaguire2013 11y ago
I love this. I actually think that if you made the questions user-definable, and offered people ways to track their own surveys over time, this would be a viable startup. The quantified life crowd is still around, and being able to track different values over time is incredibly useful. Sure, you can use a spreadsheet or whatever, but a nice pretty site like this makes it really easy and fun.
farmfood 11y ago
Is there a negativity bias here, do you think, where a bad week at work gets reported more frequently than a good week?
- GordyMD 11y ago
  This certainly is a possibility and something we will closely observe over time. I do also wonder, if someone who feels unhappy in their job is more likely to sign up to our service, that someone who is not. This could be a side effect of the product being something that is currently just aimed at individuals for their own personal use.
darkstar999 11y ago
The average is VERY stressful. What's everyone so stressed about?
techbio 11y ago
nocaptcha

221 points by hunglee2 11y ago

bargl 11y ago

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.

GordyMD 11y ago
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.
- mlrtime 11y ago
  How about a check box to opt-out of being anonymous? Some team members might want to let their manager know their individual stats.
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    Tick box sounds good. Should it be opt-out of anonymity or opt-in?
    - mlrtime 11y ago
      opt-out of anonymity in my opinion, always default to the safe choice. As your application grows you can make this a setting the manager decides.
    - rogerbraun 11y ago
      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.
- phreeza 11y ago
  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.
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    Like this idea too - kind of like how sprint estimation should be done when using poker cards.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  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"
mlrtime 11y ago
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. Thanks

walbell 11y ago

Great job!

exizt88 11y ago

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.

tommorris 11y ago
Agreed on the slider.
GordyMD 11y ago
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!
- exizt88 11y ago
  I did register for Workshape, though. So, I guess, your little project served its purpose in my case after all :-)
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    Ahh, busted!
liviu- 11y ago
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.
- mkagenius 11y ago
  > I'd prefer a keyboard-only way to do it too. Interesting. in the mobile first world.

danohuiginn 11y ago

There's a problem having a five-point scale with light-hearted descriptions attached to each point. 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.

tommorris 11y ago

Track qualitative feedback too. 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.

GordyMD 11y ago
CTO of Workshape.io here. 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?
- tommorris 11y ago
  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.
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    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!

Ensorceled 11y ago

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 ...

jader201 11y ago
+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).
liviu- 11y ago
Seconded 2. I'd rather have no explicit descriptions of what each mark should reflect, as I'd prefer to make up a scale of my own that fits my needs.
zacharycohn 11y ago
Fwiw, I love the slider. I don't have to think "was today a 7 or an 8?" Instead I just throw the slider to a "pretty high." 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.
topherjaynes 11y ago
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."
roneesh 11y ago
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.

tfeldmann 11y ago

I really like the site! Please provide an API or at least an export functionality in the long run. I'd hate to see another service I use disappear.

GordyMD 11y ago
We will be providing an API in the future for sure.

brudgers 11y ago

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. [1]: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-with-linda-rising/ http://www.se-radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-w... [2]: https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionservices/mediation https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionserv...

trequartista 11y ago

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.

GordyMD 11y ago

CTO of Workshape.io here. 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.

krisdol 11y ago
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.
ripter 11y ago
Keep the slider and faces, it's the best part of the UI. If it was one of those lame pick a number things, I wouldn't have done it.

stephen123 11y ago

I really like the idea. 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.

taneq 11y ago

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.

xbryanx 11y ago

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.

timblair 11y ago

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. [1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood-with-a-niko-niko-calendar/ http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...

GordyMD 11y ago
Thanks for your comment - spot on. In particular the point around quiet/reserved members of the team - this is certainly a medium that these people could be more comfortable with.

keslag 11y ago

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.

rpwilcox 11y ago
I too like the idea, and am of two minds of this. 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")

bengale 11y ago

I've been working on something like this myself, there are no new ideas under the sun I guess!

mister_m 11y ago

Can I get an explanation of what this is before I sign up? There is a sentence on the homepage, but it tells me next to nothing.

GordyMD 11y ago
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]. Hope that helps clarify. [1] http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile-retrospective http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile...
- mister_m 11y ago
  It does; thank you.

shocks 11y ago

> Password can't contain spaces Eh. Why not? It's 2015.

PMan74 11y ago
Conservation efforts, hike Helium there's a finite amount, we're hitting Peak Space. Only reasonable explanation, right?
- GordyMD 11y ago
  ^^^ What he said! P.S We'll look into it.
  - shocks 11y ago
    Ha! Thanks. : )
gknoy 11y ago
My users.txt is space delimited. ;)
- chaqke 11y ago
  That would cause usernames with spaces to overwrite passwords ;-)

nsxwolf 11y ago

Share on Facebook? No.

totalrobe 11y ago
Go wild. Share on linkedin.

antjanus 11y ago

Reminds me a lot of Happiness Metric: https://www.happinessmetric.com/ https://www.happinessmetric.com/ I used them for a long time.

superbilk 11y ago
awesome, you still remember us :-) (I'm the founder of happinessmetric.com and antjanus and me had some conversations in the past about features) 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.
- antjanus 11y ago
  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 definitely agree with all your takeaways!

roneesh 11y ago

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.

tamersalama 11y ago
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.
- mtrimpe 11y ago
  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...
fweespeech 11y ago
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.
applecore 11y ago
Agreed. The slider makes clear the spectrum of possibilities.

lighthawk 11y ago

Nice! How will it be monetized?

swanson 11y ago

I'm very interesting in tracking team mood. We track ours daily (using https://moraleapp.com https://moraleapp.com). Here is a graph of my team (10 devs) mood over the past six months or so: http://i.imgur.com/Pxla7fl.png http://i.imgur.com/Pxla7fl.png (you might notice we had a really bad day in April, but quickly recovered)

dimino 11y ago
Happiness on your team is trending downwards. 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.
Retr0spectrum 11y ago
What happened on the bad day, if you don't mind me asking?
- prottmann 11y ago
  To know this use http://teamspir.it http://teamspir.it - Logbook for Teams
- swanson 11y ago
  Had a challenging week working with an offsite team that just came to a boiling point.
developer1 11y ago
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.

jnicholsoniname 11y ago

I would pay for this if I could use it for my team, preferably daily.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

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.

sridca 11y ago
Ah, finally someone said it. 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 https://github.com/srid/chronicle

arobertson 11y ago

May I recommend a similar self hosted journaling application: https://www.trailmix.life/landing https://www.trailmix.life/landing https://github.com/codecation/trailmix https://github.com/codecation/trailmix

rpwilcox 11y ago

I like it. The sliders are great, especially showing emotions in the spaces between states: "I'm not quite angry mad, but my :-| face is reasonably red". I would like a free form text field, a more like, "What's bothering you this week?". Some things can't be expected / measured by sliders, but may be important to a person to note historically.

andygcook 11y ago

One of my coworkers actually created a system to do this manually in Google Docs almost a year ago. This post was a gentle reminder to me that there are always other smart people working on almost the same exact idea as you. Also a reminder that usage is like oxygen for a startup. He never actually built out the product, but proved demand manually using Excel. he should have built this - I'm glad someone did though and great execution Retroospect.

alexgaribay 11y ago

Icons in Safari aren't lined up like they should be compared to Chrome.

GordyMD 11y ago
Thanks, we'll get this addressed.

sagivo 11y ago

I will be happy to get aggregated info based on company/country/day etc..

aayala 11y ago

Sometimes your job depend on others I don't see that options like (block by other team(S))

agotterer 11y ago

This is a brilliant project for workshape. For those who aren't familiar they are building a platform with a new approach to recruiting . What better way to target potential candidates then to already knowing how happy or unhappy they. Well played!

GordyMD 11y ago
Thanks! The bigger picture for us, with Workshape.io and Retroospect, is really about understanding how happiness and work sit together and helping individuals, groups, and companies get access to this information in a format that can be used to make better decisions. Whilst Workshape, right now, is a recruiting platform for companies who need to hire developers, we think its application is much bigger. We are looking into how to go about next steps to move into other areas and make it useful even if you aren't currently seeking a new challenge. Hopefully this would make Workshape and Retroospect very complimentary.

pretzel 11y ago

Just throwing this in here - we already do this at my work with a thing called office vibe [1]. Everyone seems to like it . [1] https://www.officevibe.com https://www.officevibe.com

eatitraw 11y ago

Anyone else have problem signing up? The forms just don't work. I press "Sign up" but nothing happens EDIT: now they've sent me 8 welcome emails. Hmm

elfchief 11y ago

The signup form definitely has some user experience fail in it. I give an email address and password, click the "sign-up" button, and... nothing. Absolutely nothing. No page load, no progress indicator, nothing. Pull up developer tools, turns out there is actually a POST going on behind the scenes, which is getting a 503. So, there's probably overloaded servers, but it should would be nice if that were exposed anywhere besides the developer console...

GordyMD 11y ago
Yea. Just hit the limits of a single dyno in Heroku! :/ Issue should now be resolved.
- rocky1138 11y ago
  It's important: did the underlying problem get fixed (not displaying an error on a 503) or is it "resolved" only by throwing more hardware/resources at it?
  - GordyMD 11y ago
    The problem was fixed - we found the root cause of API becoming unresponsive and returning 503 responses and then fixed the issue. The issue was to do with the averages endpoint re-calculating every time it was called, this ate up alot the resources on the dyno - we've cached this now so this no longer happens. It is still running on the same resources, no 'throwing' more anything at it at this point.

webmonkeyuk 11y ago

I'm a lazy user and you lost me at the "sign-up" process. Would be great if it was possible to auth via Google, Facebook

riffraff 11y ago
ditto, google/twitter/facebook/github are all ok for me, just don't make me type my email again.
- davidjnelson 11y ago
  Prefer google auth too myself, but a nice workaround is the text expansion feature in iOS where if you type in the first three letters of your email it auto fills the rest.
Karunamon 11y ago
There's no way to win this. Include social media signin, the "ZOMG PRIVACY" crowd yells at you. Don't include them, and the "ZOMG EMAIL ADDRESS" crowd yells at you. Not directed at you specifically, but people waste more time complaining about signin options than actually going through the process. It's kind of funny.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  You can do both.

mathattack 11y ago

Would it be feasible to have this all on one page to easily and quickly fill out? It's clearly a 1st prototype, so I'll cut a lot of slack on the mechanics. Overall it could be a great way for medium and large companies (where it's impossible for everyone to talk to everyone every day) to understand the sentiment of their people. Keep going with this, please!

dotsamuelswan 11y ago

For a company that matches employees to employers, this is a pretty brilliant passive way of saying "Hey, look at how unexciting or terrible your job is, we can help!" Personally, I was neutral across the board. Instantly had me thinking "should I be poking around for a new gig?", even if responsibilities/life make that somewhat unpractical.

mrmondo 11y ago

Any reason you don't have SSL / HTTPS on the registration page? Feels a little risky entering details on a form without SSL these days.

zackbleach 11y ago

Great job.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mooreds 11y ago

I signed up. Seems like a good idea. However, I've tried to do this kind of thing in the past, with a spreadsheet on my phone. Just ended up forgetting/deciding not to do it, even with a calendar reminder. Will be interesting to see if the graphs and email reminders are enough to push me over the hump this time and give enough data to make it useful.

dockd 11y ago

The fact that people are very passionate about the slider means you're onto something. (Wish I could find the story about how it's better to have a few people who really love your product than a bunch who simply like it.)

groby_b 11y ago

Try two-dimensional selection. E.g. instead of just a "stressed" slider, have a grid with X-axis of "workload" (low to high) and Y-axis of "pressure". Or "anxiety". See here for an example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emotionsense&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emo... It's surprisingly intuitive, at least for the axes the devs of that app have chosen.

tonylemesmer 11y ago

Cuban council's moodstats[1] is an app that I wish was still available. 90's pixelpushing in the extreme but still pretty nonetheless. It allowed you to track several subjective metrics over time. With these mood tracking apps however the outcomes are probably simple aren't they? If you're not happy at work whatcha gonna do? Get a new job or have an argument with your boss. [1] http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/moodstats http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/moodstats

kevin 11y ago

Odd to see so many people focus on the slider. I don’t really care about the slider--meaning I'm neutral on it. What I do like is your copy for describing the sentiments. I threw the slider back and forth just to see all the options. Unlike other surveys, it felt like it more accurately resonated with me over other likert scales: http://allpsych.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/likertscales.gif http://allpsych.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/likertscales.... I think that made the biggest difference on getting people to contribute. It felt like the data was going to represent me. This is probably a small experiment, but if you’re thinking about this mini-site as a form of lead generation for WorkShape…then your main goals should be around getting people’s credentials and having it spread to their coworkers. I would highly recommend figuring out how to give people accounts without passwords needed up front. It should feel almost like a mailing list at the end of the survey… “Thanks! Let us know your email and we’ll check back in on you next week.” Bonus points if you explain clearly why tracking this weekly is good for them. Then in your confirmation email, you can say you generated a password and you can follow their stats over time through this login link. Your secondary goal should be explicit as well (if it’s what I think it is). “Want to track how your entire team is feeling this week? Send them a link.” Repeat on telling them why that’s a great idea. Right now, everything seems a little too subtle. Of course, I know you were probably just whipping this up to get it out the door. Again, the copy is the best part of this site. If you change anything on the interface, be sure to leave that alone. Good luck taking this further!

GordyMD 11y ago
Appreciate the comment and time taken to write this. We do quite like the labels too, but I do recognise, as pointed out by others, that their presence could create a form of bias. I believe that the choice of wording could divide the audience, with some people connecting with the sentiment of each and some people not. The concept of the survey is a neat idea, and could be a good thing for us try out. The suggestion of adding in a prompt for inviting team members is also good, if we decide to go down that route. Thanks again!

johnmaguire2013 11y ago

I love this. I actually think that if you made the questions user-definable, and offered people ways to track their own surveys over time, this would be a viable startup. The quantified life crowd is still around, and being able to track different values over time is incredibly useful. Sure, you can use a spreadsheet or whatever, but a nice pretty site like this makes it really easy and fun.

farmfood 11y ago

Is there a negativity bias here, do you think, where a bad week at work gets reported more frequently than a good week?

GordyMD 11y ago
This certainly is a possibility and something we will closely observe over time. I do also wonder, if someone who feels unhappy in their job is more likely to sign up to our service, that someone who is not. This could be a side effect of the product being something that is currently just aimed at individuals for their own personal use.

darkstar999 11y ago

The average is VERY stressful. What's everyone so stressed about?

techbio 11y ago

nocaptcha