
HappyOrNot terminals look simple, but the information they gather is revelatory - aarghh
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/customer-satisfaction-at-the-push-of-a-button
======
dingaling
I was leaving Lidl recently with my toddler and whilst demonstrating to him
how to use the terminal I accidentally pressed the 'sad face'.

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.

~~~
mcphage
It seems like it would lose a lot of its effectiveness if the people at the
store can see what you rate them.

~~~
notimetorelax
No, not really. I think it’s similar to NPS. It’s visible to the store clerks
to allow them to correct their mistakes on the spot, instead of having to
involve corporate teams. It’s the same idea as the one behind short
development cycles. It gets you faster to the goal. And the ultimate goal for
the company is to provide good service and not to have another way to evaluate
employees.

~~~
gowld
How could store clerks correct or even understand their mistakes just by
seeing a frowny push? The data most likely do go to corporate (which will
return to the PoS as retribution), as evidenced by distress seen on the
staff's faces when the frowny button was pushed.

NPS is a disaster. Since it's directly tied to financial consequences for
staff, (1) staff beg for 10s, (2) anyone who knows how NPS works and has a
conscience always gives 10 in order to protect staff from maangemetn abuse.

~~~
jdmichal
I never understood why they even bother with 5- or 10-point systems when the
only "good" signal is a 10. If that's all you want to collect, just _ask me if
I was happy or not_. Don't give me a bullshit range and hope I know that only
the most sparkling of reviews will save the employee I actually like.

~~~
mseebach
Because these people aren't doing NPS, they're doing cargo cult Goodhart
management.

NPS has ten steps because that granularity allows you to track improvements
even in good teams.

If all you're doing with NPS is taking people out back and shooting them for a
9, then you're missing out on a lot of value.

~~~
marcosdumay
Doing NPS is impossible, because nobody will use the intermediate ratings.

Besides, people are pretty much incoherent about what is the difference
between a 3 and a 7. Some people's 3 are a much higher rank than other
people's 7.

Putting 10 options in front of random people is mostly useless. There are very
few places where it will lead to meaningful choice.

~~~
hinkley
Netflix documented this pretty well. They also know that a 3 on a Monday means
something different than a 3 on Friday night, even from the same person.

These and other things came out of the competition to improve the success rate
of the recommendation system.

------
jv22222
Now THAT is what professional PR looks like.

~~~
ninkendo
You could even say "this" is what professional PR looks like, since getting
this on HN is certainly part of the PR as well.

~~~
maxander
In 2018, a reasonable person might suspect that _this_ is what professional PR
looks like, too, since a forward-thinking advertising firm wouldn't
necessarily balk at hiring people to post nice things about it. :)

~~~
taneq
It's professional PR all the way down.

~~~
IntronExon
No no, at some point there still has to be a broad layer of tortoises or the
whole thing collapses.

------
gaving
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" [https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-
down-c291f015618f](https://medium.com/the-blueprint/shields-down-c291f015618f)
using this method.

[https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not](https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-
not)

Never got around to analyzing the data, too scared.

~~~
amenod
Are you kidding? Go take a look! Either you feel good about your company, or
you get a chance to make it better - you win both ways!

------
etimberg
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.

~~~
dtech
Won't the absence of ratings be suspicious to management?

Maybe they have an employee pressing random buttons in the back room at
frequent intervals.

~~~
megy
Maybe they just get a daily report?

~~~
isostatic
The ratings are timestamped

------
rossdavidh
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.

~~~
koala_man
Are you saying that when a cashier asked, people didn't automatically smile
and say "I'm fine, thanks" no matter how awful they felt the experience was?

~~~
marcosdumay
When a store clerk was doing badly, somebody would tell him, because he would
personally know many of his clients.

------
mrguyorama
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.

I wish larger companies would take note

~~~
majormajor
Human interaction is both under- and over-rated by tech companies.

On one hand, we spam the ever-living shit out of people with email ads, push
notification ads, etc to try to generate engagement.

On the other hand, we sometimes go out of our way to remove the human element
from other parts of the loop: consider how rare it is to see a prominent
"never ever recommend me this [show|song|book|whatever] again" button. With
the massive number of potential features to choose from for finding similar
pieces off content, I'd like to have more control there. Like a way to tell
Spotify "I want my Discover Weekly playlist to only pull from songs that are
less than 5 years old" or such.

~~~
mrguyorama
Spotify actually _does_ have a "Never recommend this song or this artist
again" feature. If you click on the "No" symbol next to the heart in your
daily mix or Discover weekly.

~~~
majormajor
> Spotify actually does have a "Never recommend this song or this artist
> again" feature. If you click on the "No" symbol next to the heart in your
> daily mix or Discover weekly.

Ooh, thanks.

The iPad app seems to be missing this... No heart, either.

Now to google to figure out the heart vs the + button, too, hah.

~~~
mrguyorama
It also works better than the "thumbs down" button on spotify radio, which
always seemed to play the disliked tracks _more_

------
swanson
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.

The best outcomes we ever achieved were triggering a conversation. Helpful,
but I'm not sure I would call it "revelatory".

------
cpeterso
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.

~~~
vanderZwan
Not much worse than a regular door handle, I expect?

~~~
hnal943
I can't remember the last airport I was at where there was an actual door you
had to open. Although that is probably more for convenience w/bags than
cleanliness.

~~~
sangnoir
I am assuming the airport had stalls with doors, and those doors had latches.
I admit I don't travel very widely, but I'm yet to see hands-free stalls.

It shouldn't be hard to order the sequence of steps such that washing your
hands is your last activity before leaving the bathroom.

~~~
hnal943
That's true. I've seen these buttons at the Seattle airport, and they were
positioned at the door. But that doesn't mean they would have to be there.

------
zitterbewegung
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?

~~~
koala_man
The Amazon IoT button quickstart guide is a tutorial for making the button
send an email to an address of your choice, so arguably this already exists.

------
keyboardhitter
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.)

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.

~~~
diggan
Reading the article, yes, you're leaving more information than you think (but
maybe not more than you're willing to share).

Video monitoring is mentioned in the article together with timestamping. A
store had a "customer satisfaction" problem in the morning, so together with
video footage, they could determine there was slow-starting employee who was
at fault.

> One client discovered that customer satisfaction in a particular store
> plummeted at ten o’clock every morning. Video from a closed-circuit security
> camera revealed that the drop was caused by an employee who began work at
> that hour and took a long time to get going. She was retrained, and the
> frowns went away.

------
slyfocks
Unless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense
against malicious users.

While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button,
it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.

~~~
lallysingh
Or a camera pointed at the button

~~~
majormajor
Less invasive potential starting point: compare number of impressions with
number of sales, look for suspicious outliers. More sophisticated options
could be derived from similar easy-to-get numbers, too, like amount of foot
traffic, door openings, etc.

~~~
gowld
But this would never happen, since the gimmick is to deploy a system to
generate vanity metrics, not solve any problems.

------
Falling3
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.

~~~
Splines
That's interesting that they'd measure the parking lot experience. I wonder
how they can change the parking lot experience to experiment with happiness
levels. Route traffic differently through the different aisles? Provide
shuttle services? Add distractions/things to read/music on the walk into the
store?

~~~
Falling3
Yea, those are all really interesting suggestions! I assume they'll be trying
some small changes to see how they affect the experience.

------
crankylinuxuser
A portion of this story reminded me of the "Story of Manna" by Marshall Brain
regarding the automated fast food restaurant.

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.

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.

------
flyinghamster
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.

------
shem73
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.

~~~
taneq
The thing that really annoys me is when the question doesn't match the way the
data's used. My ISP asks for a rating out of 10 for "how likely would you be
to recommend <ISP> to family and friends" after every support call, but the
phone operators explicitly tell you that they're rated on the score that you
give them. Those are two different questions - I'd like to rate the phone
operator highly, the back-end technical administrators as average (they once
assigned the same IP address to myself and another customer - it's
disappointing that this is even a manual process!) and the ISP as a whole as
'could be improved' due to their lack of upstream bandwidth at peak times.

------
TheAceOfHearts
Never seen this before.

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?

~~~
onion2k
The interesting data is whether or not the business is getting better or worse
over time, so any outliers in the data probably wouldn't change anything at
all. If they're not outliers then a policy of voting "very unhappy" regardless
is just adding to weight of other very unhappy voices.

~~~
taneq
The problem with this is that once every vote is "10 or bust" your signal
saturates and becomes meaningless.

What they really need to ask, if you're right about what they want to measure,
is "Was your experience today better / same / worse than last time?" And then
they need to stop pushing for you to click "better" every time, "same" should
be the usual response unless they've actually improved notably.

------
wglb
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.

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.

(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.)

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.

------
stcredzero
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.

~~~
sago
I agree. My first idle thought reading the article was "I could have done
that.", My second thought was "I totally wouldn't, I would've made it way too
complicated."

------
bringtheaction
I love these terminals, and I almost always push the feedback button when I
have been in a store where they have one.

------
joncalhoun
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 _any_ checkout
experience.

------
username223
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.

------
herald17
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?

------
johnchristopher
I will not stop pushing the happy face on these fucked-up orwellian totems
piece of alienation s __*.

------
AlphaWeaver
I still don't know what these things are- the only picture on mobile was a
animation from an artist...

~~~
Momquist
[https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/smiley-terminal/](https://www.happy-or-
not.com/en/smiley-terminal/)

------
twooclock
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).

------
yodon
It there a secret sauce or barrier to entry here? This seems like an a weekend
project to replicate...

~~~
oftenwrong
Doing it at scale. Making the terminals. Selling the service to businesses.
Deploying the terminals.

~~~
cryptonector
Sales is the hard part.

------
sschueller
How long until these NB-IoT devices get hacked cause havoc?

------
mrintegrity
They seem to me to be an efficient disease spreader, especially in flu season,
I always press with the back of my knuckle for that reason.

~~~
13of40
The only place I've run into one of these so far was leaving an airport
bathroom, which is pretty much one of the last places I'd want to share a
button with strangers. There's a reason those places typically don't have
doors.

~~~
koala_man
Makes sense for "somewhat happy" ratings, but I imagine that if you found the
bathroom disgusting, you would still find some way to press that button.

------
tekkk
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.

