Circles vs. scales: an empirical evaluation of emotional assessment GUIs for mobile phones

Natural emotional experiences happen "in the wild" as people are mobile, living their daily lives. To capture these experiences, emotion researchers often give participants smartphone applications with various graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to record how they are feeling, however, there exist few empirical tests that assess the comparative benefits and drawbacks of different GUI designs. This paper presents two empirical evaluations of three types of GUI designs for capturing emotion using both a 10 participant in-lab trial and a 100 participant AMT trial. We define GUI scoring metrics and report on participants' ability to rate real world scenarios and evocative images, respectively, in ways that are consistent with population norms and with respect their own emotion word choices. We additionally report on users preferences for different designs, their perceived ease of use and the average time taken to complete an assessment for the different designs.