Like and dislike in 10 seconds. A user experience (UX) technique to rate the emotional reaction of users

Authors: Rodrigo Ronda and Lilibeth Valdés Payo.

Reviewed by: Eric Reiss

Introduction

Today, there are many usability techniques to evaluate a user’s experience. From quantitative to qualitative, many techniques have been used to rate software quality. During the re-design process of the Cuban Health Portal, INFOMED (www.infomed.sld.cu), a simple technique was created in order to rate the first reaction in users when they revisit a familiar website. It is a very useful way to evaluate the user’s emotional state. It is a cheap and simple technique that can be used in any project. By “emotion,” we mean a strong feeling about somebody or something. This is a user-centered design test.

The technique

The main goal of this technique is to catch the first impression (good or bad) about a product (in this case, a website), although it can be used to quantify how many likes or dislikes can be associated with other kinds of products, too.

The technique consists of giving users a sheet of paper and asking them to write his/her likes and dislikes about the product. This answer must be done within 10 seconds.

The reason for doing the test in 10 seconds is to try to get the real feeling of users in a short time. These 10 seconds are not restricted. The time to allow people to think about their impressions could be more or less 10 seconds. If you delay the time of thinking about the product, users may slant the answer with social emotions and not self-emotions. This is a good reason to apply the test to a person individually, instead of a group of people. When people are in groups, they often influence one another’s responses. So, applying the test to a single person provides a more sincere reaction than in a group.

Now, it is important to define a user profile. You must select real users of the product to apply this technique. Real users are the users who frequently use the product. If no real users are selected, you will not be able to receive real emotional answers. In short, people who never use the product are simply unable to rate it in 10 seconds.

To apply this technique, one could use a sheet of paper with the following structure. The sheet of paper will be given to a user. The user will write their likes and dislikes on the sheet of paper. The sheet structure could be like this:

The poll can theoretically include all demographic data the project needs. It depends on what the project needs to gain to evaluate the score.

When the poll is given to real users, one can observe qualitative aspects such as:

• How do users take the test? Do they agree with it or disagree?
• How do they start the test? Do they start on Likes or Dislikes?
• Do they prefer to be anonymous, or do they identify themselves without objections?

People who agree to take the test must take it without objection. If people do not like the test, the answers might be false. The test must be seen as a game to express what they like from the bottom of their heart.

It is also important to observe and note what the users write first, their likes or dislikes. You must pay careful attention to this. If users start with likes, well, the first thing that comes to their mind is good. But if they start with dislikes, we can assume that the first thing that comes to their mind is bad.

Sometimes users do not want to acknowledge their feelings about a product. They may feel bad if other people know what they think about a product. For this reason, it is important to encourage people to be sincere.

When you collect the test results, you can create a table to quantify all the likes and dislikes.

Experience applying the test

The reason for creating and using this test was that the website Infomed (Cuban Health Portal) had many services that were not being used very often. We wanted to know what was going on with the relationship between users and product.

Then, the test was applied during the process of re-designing the website, and it was applied to two kinds of users. Firstly, it was applied to internal users; the users who create content and use the product every day. Secondly, it was applied to external users; the users who consume information on the website. The total number of users was 30. Half were internal and half external.

The professions of these users were doctors, executives, librarians, medical students, technicians, and programmers.  All of them were real users of the website with in-depth experience over a longer period of time.

User’s hierarchy:

• Real users of the website:
  1. Internal users: Doctors, Executives, Librarians, Technicians, and Programmers.
  2. External user: Doctors, Medical Students.

The results of the test were very interesting.  There were more dislikes than likes. We can expect that internal users would write more likes than dislikes, but many of them wrote more dislikes than likes. That was interesting because the internal user, who was expected to identify more closely with the product, instead felt many dislikes about it.

The external users wrote more dislikes than likes, but many of these dislikes were about elements that they did not know about the product. These included, for example, services and functions inside the website of which they were unaware.

We then compared contradictions between “likes and dislikes” and found many. Internal users knew elements inside the website that external users did not know.

The preliminary result of this applied technique was that the website, from a mental point of view, was positioned incorrectly. It became clear that the institution must create a new strategy to improve both the website’s user experience as well as the mental position. Other results suggested information architecture and graphic design problems, including long texts, ambiguous labels, poor banner design, bad findability, etc.

Conclusions

This helps us understand how users feel about a product. It is a very simple and useful technique to detect bigger problems during the early periods of evaluation. It’s also great for understanding what users know about your product because they’re honest about their feelings. This technique can be used to measure the initial emotional reaction.

This technique is also useful because it is cheap and simple, which is a significant benefit during a product redesign.

This technique can be used online because it can also be set up as an interactive form.

Bibliography

• Garret, Jesse James. The Elements of User Experience. User Center Design for the Web and Beyond. (Second Edition). New Riders, 2011.
• Kuniavsky, Mike. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003.
• Wilson, Chauncey (editor). User Experience Re-Mastered. Your Guide to Getting the Right Design.  Elsevier, Morgan Kaufmann Publisher, 2010.