
Show HN: Retroospect – How was your work week? - hunglee2
http://www.retroospect.com/
======
roneesh
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
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
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...

------
Ensorceled
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 ...

~~~
roneesh
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.

~~~
bargl
I'm going to second this. I loved the slider and shades rather than a specific
number. It gave me a way to guage where I felt like I was. I also liked that
there was a description to say, hey this is what a 10 really is, don't just
give a 10 because you want your job to be exceptional. In my case it helped me
be more honest with myself (I'm a habitual 10 or 1 guy.

------
kevin
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....](http://allpsych.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/likertscales.gif)

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
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!

------
swanson
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)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
What happened on the bad day, if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
swanson
Had a challenging week working with an offsite team that just came to a
boiling point.

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

~~~
GordyMD
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.

------
exizt88
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.

~~~
liviu-
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
> I'd prefer a keyboard-only way to do it too.

Interesting. in the mobile first world.

~~~
tommorris
Laptops are mobile.

Microsoft Surface devices are mobile.

iPads with bluetooth keyboards are mobile.

Developers also tend to spend quite a lot of time sitting at desktop-class
machines with nice big monitors, because amazingly enough
Emacs/IntelliJ/Visual Studio/whatever doesn't run on an iPad mini.

------
xbryanx
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.

------
shocks
> Password can't contain spaces

Eh. Why not? It's 2015.

~~~
PMan74
Conservation efforts, hike Helium there's a finite amount, we're hitting Peak
Space.

Only reasonable explanation, right?

~~~
GordyMD
^^^ What he said!

P.S We'll look into it.

~~~
shocks
Ha! Thanks. : )

------
GordyMD
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
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.

------
elfchief
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
Yea. Just hit the limits of a single dyno in Heroku! :/

Issue should now be resolved.

~~~
rocky1138
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
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.

------
rpwilcox
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.

------
keslag
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
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")

------
tfeldmann
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
We will be providing an API in the future for sure.

------
dotsamuelswan
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.

------
mathattack
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!

------
mooreds
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.

------
bargl
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
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.

~~~
phreeza
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
Like this idea too - kind of like how sprint estimation should be done when
using poker cards.

------
JoeAltmaier
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
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)

------
webmonkeyuk
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

~~~
Karunamon
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
You can do both.

------
danohuiginn
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.

------
brudgers
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-w...](http://www.se-
radio.net/2008/07/episode-105-retrospectives-with-linda-rising/)

[2]:
[https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionserv...](https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionservices/mediation)

------
taneq
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.

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

~~~
GordyMD
Thanks, we'll get this addressed.

------
tonylemesmer
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)

------
groby_b
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.emo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emotionsense&hl=en)

It's surprisingly intuitive, at least for the axes the devs of that app have
chosen.

------
andygcook
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.

------
trequartista
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.

------
mrmondo
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.

------
johnmaguire2013
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.

------
tommorris
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
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
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
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!

------
arobertson
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)

------
stephen123
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.

------
nsxwolf
Share on Facebook? No.

~~~
totalrobe
Go wild. Share on linkedin.

------
agotterer
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
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.

------
dockd
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.)

------
pretzel
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)

------
antjanus
Reminds me a lot of Happiness Metric:
[https://www.happinessmetric.com/](https://www.happinessmetric.com/) I used
them for a long time.

~~~
superbilk
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
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!

------
eatitraw
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

------
mister_m
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
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...](http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/Agile-
retrospective)

~~~
mister_m
It does; thank you.

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

~~~
GordyMD
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.

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

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

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

------
darkstar999
The average is VERY stressful. What's everyone so stressed about?

------
zackbleach
Great job.

------
lighthawk
Nice! How will it be monetized?

------
techbio
nocaptcha

------
walbell
Great job!

