
Smiley Slider - john_horton
http://glittle.org/blog/smiley-slider/
======
modernerd
Akismet's sign up page has been using a similar idea since their relaunch. You
can see it in action if you:

1\. Visit <https://akismet.com/signup/>

2\. Click "Sign Up" under the Personal plan.

3\. Move the "What is Akismet worth to you?" slider.

They use a sprite[1] in their version, not the canvas, but the effect is
similar. I'd suggest that their implementation is a little clearer than the
one presented in this thread's link; moving a control and seeing a face to the
right of the slider change its expression is possibly clearer than grabbing
the face itself, where your mouse pointer partially hides the expression.

[1]: <https://akismet.com/img/ab/smiley.png>

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bradleyland
Tangential, but does anyone else find it difficult to assess their happiness
with a given interaction beyond the ternary states of bad, meh, and great?
Usually questions associated with satisfaction are given a scale of one to
five, or one to ten. My responses tend to be at the ends of the spectrum or
indifferent.

This slider is interesting in that I somehow identify with the state of the
slider. There's an emotional feedback I feel with the state of the face on the
slider. At some point, I feel that the face and my feelings match. I think
this would allow me to offer a more detailed insight in to my feelings about a
particular interaction, provided I was asked for the feedback immediately.

~~~
john_horton
This is exactly what prompted us making this thing---some of my co-workers at
oDesk were talking about how dissatisfied we are with the whole 1-10/NPS score
way of getting feedback.

As far as the slider---my motivation was that humans are sensitive to the
emotional content of even very tiny changes in a human face (which is the
logic behind the Chernoff face <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face>)
and that the smiley-faced slider would get people to (a) use the "same" scale
for conveying their feelings and (b) convey their feelings more precisely.
It's on our agenda to do some tests with it---shoot me an email if you want to
try it on your site & see how it does. It probably won't make it into our
product too soon :(

~~~
jerf
I would very much love to hear on HN about any results that you or anybody
else come up with. My suspicion is that if this works out as you intend the
distribution won't even require any fancy math to show people use it
differently, it'll be blindingly obvious in a histogram. It's brilliant.

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xutopia
The server is getting hit hard. You can see a mirror here:
<http://dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider/>

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ck2
Those eyebrows - subtle!

I like the idea of a slider and smilies vs a 5 star system perhaps for a
personal touch.

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kgen
Kinda random, but slowly sliding this from left to right actually made me
smile! Must be the mirror neurons working hard there, and a pretty usability
test :)

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pamelafox
I made a similar thing (also aptly named smiley slider), but based on SVG
instead of canvas: <http://imagine-it.org/svg/sliderplugin.html>
(<https://github.com/pamelafox/smileyslider>) We used that for an app for
letting people rate how much they liked talks at Google I/O.

Since then, I've used the same slider codebase to make a colored slider (green
-> red), and I use that in my nutrition tracking app for letting people rate
how well they avoided food groups each day (screenshot:
<http://www.everyday.io/img/tour_logs.png>).

I find it easier to drag a slider than pick a choice when it comes to
assessments. It's less stress for the user. Or atleast that's my hope. :)

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bitwize
I had a flashback to one of the coolest video games of the early 90s PC era,
_Aladdin_ based on the Disney movie. In place of a conventional "life bar", in
the upper left corner there was an image of Genie, whose expression would
change from happy to concerned to terrified as you lost health. I always
thought that was innovative. At a glance -- in less time than it took for your
eye to measure the actual length of a health bar and compare it to its
potential full length -- you knew with remarkable precision how much more
punishment you could take before dying.

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atzip
Atzip uses an animated smiley slider (since June 2011)

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/atzip/id423929361?mt=8>

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pbhjpbhj
The <http://moodbe.at> one mentioned in the comments of the OP's link is
really good IMO.

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yogrish
very nice slider. Now feed back ratings are going to show true feelings rather
than being discrete/Robotic.

