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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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 :)
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. :)
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.
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