Understanding Emotion for Happy Users

Blog Post: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2020/11/understanding-emotion-for-happy-users.html

There is little doubt that closely watched metrics tend to improve over time while metrics that are either uninteresting, or hard to collect tend to get ignored, and often get worse.

Web developers and operations professionals have many tools available to understand and improve the overall performance and health of their websites. Tools that tell us how fast our site is, what the bounce, or conversion rate is, whether any links resulted in a 404, and more. All these tools focus on making development more efficient and reducing errors.

When we focus only on improving raw numbers, we forget that there’s a human on the other end who can become frustrated with an overall bad experience and not just the numbers we’re looking at.

In this talk we will look at how to collect, analyse, and act on a few metrics that tell us more about how our user feels when using the site. We can trend how these metrics change over a user’s browsing experience, and we can improve over time the metric that really matters: user happiness.

Some of the metrics we’ll look at are:
* Rage clicks, missed clicks, and dead clicks
* Cursor thrashing
* LD50 (median lethal dose)

We’ll try and correlate these metrics with things that are easy to improve developmentally, like smoothness, jank, visible transitions, and more.

At the end of this talk you will understand which metrics are useful to measure, how to measure them, and how to tie them in to your development goals.

Transcript

1. Understanding Emotion
   for Happy Users
   How does your site make your users feel?
   Blog Post: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2020/11/understanding-emotion-for-happy-users.html
   

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2. Philip Tellis
   Principal RUM Distiller @ Akamai
   Author of the OpenSource boomerang RUM
   library
   twitter:@bluesmoon ⦿ github:@bluesmoon
   speakerdeck:@bluesmoon
   

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3. Performance is
   Usability
   Our Journey Today...
   ★ How is your site perceived?
   ★ How do we measure emotion?
   with JavaScript
   ★ Frustration Index
   

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4. Rage Against The Machine
   ● 36% of Americans with computer issues reported that they had
   screamed, yelled, cursed, or physically assaulted their computers
   ● 40% of Brits reported that they had become physically violent
   toward their computers
   ● https://youtu.be/Lkei8SYU0bc
   

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5. Perception
   How do users feel when using your site?
   

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6. A 500ms connection speed delay resulted in
   up to a 26% increase in peak frustration
   and up to an 8% decrease in engagement.
   Tammy Everts – The impact of network speed on emotional engagement
   

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7. The average rise in mobile users' heart rates caused
   by delayed web pages — equivalent to the anxiety
   of watching a horror movie alone.
   Ericsson ConsumerLab neuro research 2015
   38%
   

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8. Perception
   ● Perceptual Dissonance
   Unexpected outcomes of common actions
   ● Survivorship Bias
   We only measure users who can reach our
   site. Very slow is better than unreachable.
   ● Negativity Bias
   Bad experiences must be balanced with
   more intense good experiences
   Boston Shipyard Artist’s Community
   

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9. Acknowledging when you didn’t meet the
   user’s expectations can alleviate negative
   perceptions.
   Practice Active Listening
   https://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/02.klein-moon-picard.pdf
   https://uxdesign.cc/the-fastest-way-to-pinpoint-frustrating-user-experiences-1f8b95bc94aa
   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.01.002
   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071581904000060?via%3Dihub
   

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10. Measuring Emotion...
    How do we measure emotion from JavaScript?
    

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11. ● Ask the user
    ● Affective Computing
    ● Business Metrics
    ● Behavioural Metrics
    ● Frustration Index
    Methods of measuring Emotion
    (with JavaScript)
    

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12. Perceived UX Quality By Wikipedia
    with improved performance
    Increased Satisfaction
    Analyzing Wikipedia Users’ Perceived Quality Of Experience: A Large-Scale Study — Salutari et al, 2020
    https://twitter.com/WikiResearch/status/1241026254058532865
    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Performance_Team/Perceived_Performance
    

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13. Rage Clicks occur when users rapid-fire click
    (or tap) on your site or app.
    Rage clicking is the digital equivalent of
    cursing to release frustration.
    https://www.fullstory.com/resources/guide-to-understanding-frustrating-user-experiences-online/
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/hell-yes-the-7-best-reasons-swearing
    Rage Clicks
    

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14. People who are angry are more likely to use the mouse in
    a jerky and sudden, but surprisingly slow fashion.
    People who feel frustrated, confused or sad are less
    precise in their mouse movements and move it at
    different speeds.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12050481/Websites-could-read-emotions-by-seeing-how-fast-you-move-your-mouse.html
    https://conversionxl.com/blog/user-frustration/
    https://www.academia.edu/3085041/Patterns_of_cursor_movement_for_different_devices
    Cursor Thrashing/Wild Mouse
    

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15. Users who are confused or lost on your
    site may hit the back button to get back to
    a safe anchor point.
    Backtracking
    

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16. https://addyosmani.com/blog/usability/
    LOADING A WEBPAGE
    

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17. 0.3% 9% 57%
    WHEN DO USERS INTERACT WITH A SITE?
    

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18. Temporal Distribution of RAGE
    The horizontal axis on this chart is time as a relative percent of the full page load time. -50 indicates half of the page load time while +50 is 1.5x the page
    load time. The vertical axis indicates intensity of rage while point radius indicates probability of rage clicks at that time point. The coloured bars indicate
    25th to 75th percentile ranges for the particular timer relative to full page load with the line going through indicating the median.
    

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19. Frustration Index
    https://www.frustrationindex.com/
    

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20. Correlating Rage & Frustration
    

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21. LD
    50
    The Median Lethal Dose of your page or site indicates
    the point at which 50% of users decide to leave!
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose
    https://www.slideshare.net/buddybrewer/tying-web-performance-data-to-human-behavior
    

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22. Correlating Frustration & BUSINESS
    ρ
    t
    =-0.49
    ρ
    b
    =0.65
    LD
    50
    =22
    

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23. Patience is also a cultural thing
    People from different parts of the
    world have a different threshold
    for frustration.
    LD
    25
    Frustration Index
    

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24. So how fast should our site be? How
    do we set our performance budget?
    

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25. A final question...
    Will adding a new feature delight
    or frustrate the user?
    

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26. Thank You!
    

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27. References
    ● Computer Rage on Wikipedia
    ● The Psychology of Computer Rage
    ● A third of Americans confess to verbal or physical abuse
    of their computers
    ● Computer Rage affects more than half of Britons
    ● Social and Psychological Influences on Computer User
    Frustration
    ● The impact of network speed on emotional engagement
    ● Ericsson ConsumerLab neuro research 2015
    ● Negativity Bias on Wikipedia
    ● The fastest way to pinpoint frustrating user experiences
    ● The 7 best reasons for swearing
    ● Emotional Design
    ● Frustration Index
    ● Page Weight Matters
    ● Improving UX through Front End Performance
    ● Guide to understanding frustrating user experiences
    online
    ● Toward a more civilized design: studying the effects of
    computers that apologize
    ● Websites could read emotions by seeing how fast you
    move your mouse
    ● Your users are frustrated
    ● Patterns of cursor movement for different devices
    ● Wikipedia Paper on User Satisfaction v/s Performance
    ● Strengthening the Link between Site Speed and Business
    Outcomes
    ● Web page usability matters
    

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