I was leaving Lidl recently with my toddler and whilst demonstrating to him how to use the terminal I accidentally pressed the 'sad face'.<p>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.
Interesting 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" <a href="https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-down-c291f015618f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-down-c291f015618f</a> using this method.<p><a href="https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not</a><p>Never got around to analyzing the data, too scared.
There 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.
We 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.
Here 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.<p>I wish larger companies would take note
I 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.<p>The best outcomes we ever achieved were triggering a conversation. Helpful, but I'm not sure I would call it "revelatory".
I'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.
I 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?
The 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.)<p>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.
Unless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense against malicious users.<p>While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.
The 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.
A portion of this story reminded me of the "Story of Manna" by Marshall Brain regarding the automated fast food restaurant.<p>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.<p>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.
Just 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.
I 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.
Never seen this before.<p>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?
I think this is very clever. There is a lesson in doing something so simple, as opposed to our engineering reflex to over-engineer everything.<p>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.<p>(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.)<p>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.
This 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.
One 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 <i>any</i> checkout experience.
I 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.
Hi 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?
I'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).
I 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.