Nice design, but utterly confusing (accessibility)

I’ve seen this survey screenshot on twitter. It is the perfect example of how something that most people find nice and funny, can be utterly confusing to me. To be honest, I would probably abandon the survey right at this screen. Not because I don’t want to be nice to this person, but because I don’t get what is going on here. I do have some knowledge to start from, but very soon I get lost in translation. Here’s a summary of how that can happen:

Enter my brain:

As the question is about a reward, and I know that the value of a reward is supposed to correlate with your appreciation for this person, I get some clues on what to select. Even better, I actually know with quite high probability that I would have to select dinner if I am happy with the service provided. But what about the other two? As the most valuable reward is on the right I would think it is the most logical to have the least valuable on the left. It wouldn’t make sense to not put them in order, would it?

But a thank you note has no objective value at all. So maybe I am supposed to look at the emotional value. I think a personal thank you note could have a high emotional value, more so than a coffee. I might be biassed though, as I don’t like coffee. But what about the emotional value of a dinner then?

Maybe they just didn’t put them in order. Maybe it’s a random thing. At this point I would be clicking the reload button to see if the position of the options changes. But I can’t do that on a screenshot, so back to the coffee and the thank you note. I am still not sure which of them is supposed to represent the higher appreciation value. After all, we all learned that if someone has been nice to you, you should say thank you. So “thank you” definitively has some value. I am just not sure how to compare it to coffee.

Could it be a culture thing? Is the value of coffee and saying thank you dependent on culture? I’ve learned never to assume that what is valid for me is valid all over the world. On the other hand I would expect that an international flight company would choose something internationally valid for their survey. I am slowly starting to think that I am not going to get a certain answer about what the order of the rewards is. Which triggers doubts about my first assumption on the dinner, if I don’t get it to work all the way through the options, how can I be sure I didn’t start of on the wrong foot completely?

Why would you give someone a coffee without knowing whether they like it? Will they really give the employee a coffee? I can barely stand the smell alone of coffee. So it would be a bit cruel to give me one as a reward. So maybe they did ask. Maybe the next employee review will let people choose between a beer and a pizza.

And what if, say, 50 people on this plane, chose dinner. Is that going to get them 50 dinners? Or is it a majority voting system? What would a person do with 50 dinners a day? Giving them away would be a good option. But maybe they are not giving away dinners at all. Those rewards are very probably methaphorical. But then why do they put such senseless things like dinners and coffees? Why isn’t there just a small heart, a middle-size heart and a big heart? Or a 5$ 10$, 20$ button if you want to use the monetary value rather than the emotional value. Why do they mix it up? Why do they make it hard?

Ok, let’s stay rational. How important is it what option I choose here? This survey has really nothing to do with dinner, my gut says. It will be either about bonus or about career path, if it would be just a general client satisfaction thing they wouldn’t ask per employee. Either way the value is probably going to be averaged, but I have also seen evaluation systems where one is not supposed to get a single point in the most negative choice. And there are mostly well defined tiers in those systems so a single bad vote could put you from the lower end of one tier down into the top of the lower one. Also if it is anything like tipping in the restaurant it depends on how good the base salary is, another thing I know nothing about. I really wouldn’t want to make a too wild guess here. But how wild can a guess be out of three options? I have no clue. I really don’t get this.

Conclusion

I’ve just seen this screenshot on Twitter, and I’ve been breaking my head about it for almost an hour now (ok I’ve decided to write down some parts of my thought process which makes me slower, so make it half an hour without the writing) I’ve come to the honest conclusion that I am not able to fill this in.

I wanted to explain some of the thoughts I had while trying to figure it out, to illustrate how a system that might look fun to you can actually be really confusing to other people. That is not because those other people don’t have a sense of humor or lack imagination. It is just that not everyones thinking works exactly the same as your own.

It is always a good accessibility decision to display the information in more than one way, especially if it is coded somehow (using icons, colors, figurative speech, …) It makes me really sad that someone would make it so hard for me to cooperate. Especially if you take into account how often autistic people are accused of being rude and uncooperative. With this in mind, trying not to be confusing to anyone is a great accessibility design goal.