Show HN: Retroospect – How was your work week? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Retroospect – How was your work week?

retroospect.com

221 pointshunglee2112 comments

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.

I think it is a good idea if it was a numeric scale rather than text-based. The problem with text is you move it, read text. Numbers are easy to process at a glance of 'low -> high' or 'bad -> good'.

The descriptions aren't "right" with what I'm trying to put down even if I understand which direction I'm moving the slider.

I'm basically treating it as a numeric scale anyway.

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.

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...

Agreed. The slider makes clear the spectrum of possibilities.

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 ...

Fwiw, I love the slider. I don't have to think "was today a 7 or an 8?" Instead I just throw the slider to a "pretty high."

The point isn't the specific number, it's the general placement. And even more, it's the trend over time/comparison to average.

Love the slider.

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.

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.

I agree.

+1 to all of these. I was thinking the same points.

Additionally, speaking of work/life balance, it may make sense to have a question in there about having enough time to enjoy life or something along those lines. But maybe it overlaps enough with one or more of the other questions (i.e. stress).

Seconded 2. I'd rather have no explicit descriptions of what each mark should reflect, as I'd prefer to make up a scale of my own that fits my needs.

Agree the slider needs some tweaks, or at least ticks. If I am in between two states do it affect things? Seems like I have to move pretty far over to move to the next "response."

I've always found 1-10 choices to be a frustrating scale for things are subjective.

Rate your week, 1-10. I dunno, what is 1 even like? Are you asking me to compare to the worst possible week? Yeah, my week sucked, but I'm not in work camp or anything.

This has been the most straightforward way of asking this kind of question I've seen.

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....

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!

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!

I'm very interesting in tracking team mood. We track ours daily (using 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 (you might notice we had a really bad day in April, but quickly recovered)

Happiness on your team is trending downwards.

What are you, middle manager, going to do about it?!

Just kidding, but I've had bosses in the past who would notice something like that, and attempt to correct by sending an email out suggesting that folks answer the survey with more happiness.

Well-intentioned or not on your part, I would quit my company if they required me to input my opinions into such a tool. With only 10 devs, it is instantly possible to match any downward trend to a specific individual based on keen observation, and then penalize (no raise, no promotion) or even fire/lay off that person for not "fitting the company's core values".

Because of the possibility for abuse, chances are high that some/many of the inputs are pure bullshit anyway - people saying they're happy when they're downright miserable, out of fear of being scoped out if they log negative results.

Just another management PR stunt so they can gloat about how happy their employees are, when the results may be fabricated. Perhaps this would work in a small company where downward trends in happiness result in immediate changes based on employee suggestions. For every medium and large sized company I've worked for, this would just be another manipulative game pushed onto employees by management who will never implement any real change but can show the CEO ridiculous charts about how "happy" the employees are.

tldr; Management loves to show off reports like these, but the values input are often meaningless and only serve to antagonize employees rather than help.

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

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

To know this use http://teamspir.it - Logbook for Teams

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...

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.

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.

I kinda like the slider idea. There's no need for me to see the extreme options, it's enough to reason about whether the default case applies - if not I can play around with the slider. Exploration versus direct information is an interesting UI aspect I haven't really given much thought until now. Too much of the former and your UI looses discoverability (e.g. Office Ribbons). Too much of the latter and you overload your users with information (e.g. Eclipse Toolbar).

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.

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

Interesting. in the mobile first world.

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.

Thanks for your feedback. I must admit we did not experiment too much with different UI controls here. The continuous scale input with discretely triggered descriptors may be a bit odd to some - on reflection it is to me too!

I did register for Workshape, though. So, I guess, your little project served its purpose in my case after all :-)

Ahh, busted!

Agreed on the slider.

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.

> Password can't contain spaces

Eh. Why not? It's 2015.

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

Only reasonable explanation, right?

^^^ What he said!

P.S We'll look into it.

Ha! Thanks. : )

My users.txt is space delimited. ;)

That would cause usernames with spaces to overwrite passwords ;-)

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.

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.

Keep the slider and faces, it's the best part of the UI. If it was one of those lame pick a number things, I wouldn't have done it.

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...

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

Issue should now be resolved.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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")

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

if it's a choice it will soon become a non-choice since if some people on a small team decide not to be anonymous it will be obvious who is whom anyways.

If anonymity is optional there will also likely be some implicit pressure coming from management not to be anonymous, leading to people censoring their true feelings for fear of repercussions ("so, I've noticed for the past few weeks you haven't been happy or productive, maybe this is not a good fit for us")

Not sure, maybe I am being too negative, but when it comes to anonymity and workplace surveys my default setting is "the more the better"

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.

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

How about a check box to opt-out of being anonymous? Some team members might want to let their manager know their individual stats.

Tick box sounds good.

Should it be opt-out of anonymity or opt-in?

I think having the possibility to not be anonymous would ruin it for the team. Some people might want to show how much they love the company (honest or not) by switching of anonimity. The anonymous group would thus become suspicious.

opt-out of anonymity in my opinion, always default to the safe choice. As your application grows you can make this a setting the manager decides.

Yes, I'd love to send a version of this to my team and ask them to fill it out on periodic basis. The choice to be anonymous would be good. I'm interested in the overall health of the team and to know if there are any negative outliers.

Thanks

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.

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

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

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.

You can do both.

ditto, google/twitter/facebook/github are all ok for me, just don't make me type my email again.

Prefer google auth too myself, but a nice workaround is the text expansion feature in iOS where if you type in the first three letters of your email it auto fills the rest.

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.

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...

[2]: https://www.adr.org/aaa/faces/services/disputeresolutionserv...

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.

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

Thanks, we'll get this addressed.

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

May I recommend a similar self hosted journaling application: https://www.trailmix.life/landing https://github.com/codecation/trailmix

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.

Share on Facebook? No.

Go wild. Share on linkedin.

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!

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.

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.)

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

Reminds me a lot of Happiness Metric: https://www.happinessmetric.com/ I used them for a long time.

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.

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!

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

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.

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...

It does; thank you.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Great job.

Nice! How will it be monetized?

nocaptcha

Great job!

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