6 basic emotions translated into 6 different faces (and their related emoticons)

We are in the process of launching our Emolytics Start product (If you need to know more about it, follow the link). This article explains you a part of our journey to improve of our product and the reasoning behind the technology.

Where we are today – 5 icons

So far we were proposing to our beta testers to install a small javascript code that would place a html bar at the top of their web pages.

This simple bar would appear at the top of the website’s page after 30 seconds of activity of the surfers. The surfer is then exposed to a small questionnaire like you can see here below as it shown on the KotPlanet.be website (a website aimed at the student community in Belgium):

Kotplanet.be – Emolytics Start integration

3 simple interactions are proposed to rate the surfer’s level of satisfaction about his / her experience on the website :

The emotional icons (or emoticons):We initially thought that we would use a 5 levels attitude scale: from “angry” to “very happy” with intermediary positions such as “neutral”, “somewhat perplex” and “quite satisfied”

The gender split: self explanatory

The age ranges:We decided to choose for increments of 10 years (with an exception for the ones in their teens: 13 to 19).

After collecting the 3 clicks, the webmaster can better know who is giving that feedback (at least at a socio-demographic level: age and gender) and how they feel emotionally. Getting into the human emotion analysis at a large scale is rather new in the web analytics field. All the collected data are anonymous and compiled into a separate analytics report that can be further analysed by the website owner (or analytics team) in order to improve his web presence towards its audience.

“So far, So good”, like the optimist would say during his fall in the stairs and before impact with the ground. 😉

Where we are going tomorrow – our 6 emotions

In the course of our product improvement, we asked ourselves the question :

“If we really want to stand for emotions analysis, we need to integrate or at least come close to the 6 universal emotions as defined by Paul Ekman (further reading on this scientific fact) in our widget, right?”

The Emolytics Pro will detect the face of the users and their emotions, but what about those without a webcam or who would not participate to our webcam tests? And what about the Emolytics Start users? They deserve our scientific insights too.

So we started to produce our own library of emotions based on the face of our CEO 😉

Look at the gallery:

Rather negative

Rather neutral

Rather positive

After these early designs, we did collaborate with our talented team and we came to the (almost) final design of the Emolytics Start widget that will replace the old bar.

Here are the new emoticons (preview) inspired from the above faces:

Rather negative

Rather neutral

Rather positive

A nice 3 steps flow was then created and that is taking the mobile gestures into account:

That’s it. Your turn now.

Did you try the Emolytics on your website yet?