Using Stars, Smilies, and Sliders in Healthcare Surveys

Stars, smilies, and sliders are interactive question types often used in feedback surveys to make the process more engaging and user-friendly. These formats offer a quick and visually intuitive way for respondents to rate their experiences, especially in settings where ease of use is crucial. 

Here’s a brief overview of each, along with their best applications and considerations.

Stars

Stars allow patients to rate their experience by selecting a number of stars, typically on a 1-to-5 scale. This format is widely recognized and easy to interpret, making it a popular choice for quick assessments of satisfaction or performance.

The system is best used for general satisfaction and experience ratings or service quality because it’s visually engaging, simple, and familiar to most users (let’s not forget — it’s used for Google Reviews).

However, the stars can oversimplify complex experiences into a single rating, which may not capture specific feedback.

Smilies

Smilies use emoticons ranging from sad to happy faces to gauge emotional responses. 

This format is particularly effective when surveying a broad audience, including younger or older populations who may prefer visual cues over traditional text-based survey scales.

Smilies are great for feedback with a pronounced emotional component, such as gauging patient comfort, friendliness of staff, or satisfaction with care. They are highly intuitive, quick to respond to, and ideal for emotionally driven questions. 

On the other hand, their scale and nuance are limited, and it’s harder to extract detailed insights from these fairly simplistic responses.

Sliders

Sliders allow respondents to drag a marker along a continuum, providing a more granular form of feedback. This format is best for measuring satisfaction levels, pain scales, or other aspects of care where finer distinctions are important — or, in other words, for measuring preferences where a broad range of responses is needed.

Sliders offer flexibility and precision by allowing more nuanced feedback. However, they can be less accessible to some users, especially those unfamiliar with digital interfaces. They may require more cognitive effort than stars or smilies.

Are these question types the right choice for healthcare feedback?

While stars, smilies, and sliders offer a quick and visually engaging way to collect patient feedback, they are often not the best choice for healthcare surveys due to the sector’s unique need for more actionable data. 

Healthcare is a highly personalized and sensitive industry. Gathering meaningful feedback requires more depth and specificity than these simplified systems can provide.

It’s essential to understand the nuances behind a patient’s experience — why they felt satisfied, what aspects of their care need improvement, or how they experienced a particular treatment. Stars, smilies, and sliders reduce this complexity into a single point of data, making it difficult to interpret the reasons behind the rating. 

More traditional question types, like open-ended questions, multiple choice questions, or Likert scales, allow for richer, more detailed feedback. This is crucial in healthcare settings where every aspect of the patient’s experience matters.

Healthcare surveys also aim to measure outcomes like treatment effectiveness, patient confidence in care, and overall health improvements. Such critical metrics require a level of specificity that stars, smilies, or sliders may not provide. A 5-star rating on “satisfaction” doesn’t explain whether a patient feels more confident about their health post-treatment or if their pain has been effectively managed.

Lastly, patients may interpret stars or smilies differently based on personal perceptions or cultural contexts. For instance, one patient may consider 3 stars as “satisfactory,” while another might view it as “mediocre.” 

Precision is vital in healthcare, so using more traditional question types helps reduce ambiguity and provide clearer, standardized data.

Conclusion

Stars, smilies, and sliders each have their strengths in healthcare feedback surveys — they’re engaging and visually intuitive ways for patients to rate their experiences. However, although they are quick and user-friendly, they may oversimplify feedback. 

Choosing the right format will boil down to the type of feedback you’re seeking and the patient demographic you’re targeting.