AffectButton: Towards a standard for dynamic affective user feedback

Emotions are an important aspect of life. Persons have emotions while using products and technology. It is becoming more and more important to be able to assess these emotions for multiple reasons: (a) to develop better products, (b) to better understand how the user interacts with products, and (c) because the affective state of the user is of importance to the product itself (e.g., in the case of social software, persuasive computing, recommendation). In general there are two ways of extracting affective user feedback: explicit and implicit. Here we present a new interface component that enables users to give explicit affective feedback in a flexible and dynamic way. We call this component the AffectButton. Based on statistical analysis of affective user input gathered with the AffectButton in three user studies, we present evidence that users can use the button effectively to enter affective feedback. Furthermore, the feedback is reliable and valid.