An Affective Interface for Conveying User Feedback

Capturing and understanding feedback received from customers in an efficient manner plays a critical role in areas such as Customer relationship management (CRM). Measures of customers' attitude towards a product or service are traditionally obtained using questionnaires formatted as x-point Likert scales, with results typically displayed numerically and sometimes presented in graphic forms. Current 'affective' CRM solutions have focused on customer emotion detection by recognising non-verbal cues and physiological signals from customers (Input related research). However, these methods, although technologically advanced are only at a conceptual level and lack the viability and flexibility required by current CRM solutions. This paper presents a system prototype for Non-Verbal Affective User Feedback based on output related affective research. The system converts multi-criteria based estimates of a customer's attitude towards a product or service, obtained using traditional CRM surveys, into a non-verbal representation in the form of virtual facial expressions, or emoticons. Real facial expressions provide a feedback in a concise pictorial form whose emotional content is readily recognisable. We focus on enabling the system to choose those emoticons that, with regards to their emotional content, would be unambiguously legible by users. Our approach is intended to improve the efficiency of the representation mode of CRM survey data making it visually comprehensible 'at-a-glance'.