New tool for assessing wellbeing using latest theories of positive psychology. Very user friendly and scientific.
To see a copy of what you get out the other end. See this link.
https://growhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Example_Report.pdf
Sorry, I forgot to post a request for feedback. I’m keen to hear views from the community here about what could be improved.
Registering now, will provide feedback as I do the assessment. 
First impression: I like the website’s layout and design. Spacious, and the cool color scheme put me in a placid mood as I weight the potential benefits of a 100+ question survey against the irritation of having to answer so many questions. 
I decide quickly to sign up. The language-- about the questions and analyses being developed by currently published wellness researchers-- reassures me. What the heck are wellness researchers? The term is too vague. Are you talking about cognitive neuroscientists? Psychologists? Behavioral researchers? Sociologists?
Question 1 asks me how satisfied I am with my life as a whole. I think about the research done over the years, for example, with the U.S. National Park Service. Visitors on annual GPRA surveys provide meaninglessly high reports of satisfaction time and again. Researchers in this field have since essentially stopped asking the satisfaction question-- low variance in the responses doesn’t tell you much. Instead, they ask analogous questions along four dimensions, each dissecting one part of satisfaction (preference “did it go how I wanted”, acceptability “was I ok with how it went”, external intervention “was it at a point requiring some kind of intervention”, and displacement “it was bad enough that I’m not coming back”) The situation may be different with growhq.com users. I decide to press on.
I love the richly interactive HTML5 interface for the survey (e.g., sliders, AJAX, etc). It keeps me interested.
I get a little nervous when I see survey questions asking me to synthesize what happened across the last entire month. It is easy to get garbage responses here, since negative experiences can take over other memories and be represented among responses disproportionately.
The hovering tooltip that confirms the value I’m about to enter on the Likert-type scale questions is a design masterstroke.
The questions about the purpose of my life do a good job of checking each other, so hopefully scale validity measures turn out well.
I’m a little annoyed that I can’t use my back button (Chrome running OSX 10.8) to edit answers I have entered, upon further consideration.
I’m 53% completed on the survey, cruising right along. The questions are generally clear, approachable, easy to understand, and lack double-barreling. This seems like a solid questionnaire design so far. Use of inverted value ranges on some of the questions about “past, present, or future” should start to show up so that you can catch users who are just running right down the “strongly agree” column…
I disagree with the decision to disallow users to respond “don’t know” or “not sure.” You may be getting some garbage responses if a user legitimately feels unable to supply a trusted answer.
Again, I like that each question is asked in a few different ways to provide some checks. I bet you guys use phrases like “Chronbach’s alpha” around the office with glee.
And then the question color turned to red…? This looks like a side experiment, but it isn’t evident what it might be.
Aaaand I’ve made it to the end! The ring graphs are pretty. Importance performance analyses of life domains! You guys are good!
Wait, only three infographics for answering more than a hundred questions? Aaaaw, at least give me the reacharound and finish me off with a few more than that…
The “My Actions” tab content feels a little thin relative to the rich design and interactivity of the other tabs. Wait, all those items are clickable. That’s cool. Maybe give dummies like me a little more visual cueing that every cell in that grid is actually a button instead of flat text. If I don’t happen to mouseover the grid by accident, I completely miss out on the rich interactivity you’ve built into it. Help us appreciate and enjoy your hard work!
Also, I can’t tell what growhq.com’s relationship with actionforhappiness.org is. Are you business partners? Do you just like the other website? Do you also run it? It makes me nervous when one website passes me to another and I can’t tell if that’s a commercial transaction or not. The actual relationship doesn’t really matter to me-- I just want to know if I’m being sold (my eyeballs), or if I’m about to be sold something on the new website.
The use of jQuery across the site feels judicious and smartly applied. You have a good designer on staff.
Love,
ThisUsernameIsNotMyRealName
Wow. That’s amazing feedback. I’ll answer a couple of your points.
Yes. We spent a lot on designers. I’m glad you liked it, and I agree on the weak points. I’ll get on them. I’m so happy you commented on the hovers. It made the angst worthwhile.
Sorry you only found three info-graphics. Please log back in and download your report. Its quite lengthy.
The income question seems a little weird to me.
It asks “in your local currency” but then all the numbers listed are preceded by “$” so I converted my local currency (RMB) into USD.
There was another weird grammar error near the end, but I can’t remember what it was.
Earlier, I had trouble deciding how to reply to some of the Spiritual-related questions. I’m not really sure what Spiritual really means.
Edit:
Maybe I have some contradictory beliefs? I also had trouble answering questions about Meaning, because I basically believe that life has no inherent meaning. Maybe I was thinking too philosophically? I work in healthcare & so I also believe that my work is “meaningful” in the sense the site seems to be using the word. I dunno.
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll have a look at the currency question, and see if we can improve it.
The grammar thing is a little tough. Its a bit of a trade-off between using a validated instrument (which may have bad grammar) and a slightly tweaked but different question. We have decided to stick with “validated”. You can see what’s in it and why here. https://growhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/GROW-What-is-in-the-GROW-Assessment1.pdf
On the meaning item. Sorry to say it sounds like you have some meaning in your life. Sorry might be the wrong word.
By the way we have just licensed another set of psychometrics so the free version is going to take a big step up 50% improvement in terms of validity in the next month or two.
all the best
Haha, I’m an idiot. Going back to download the report now. Reading back over the points I made, I think I came across overly negative. I really enjoyed using the site and don’t mind a bit going back in for the report.
Thanks for what you’ve provided to us![hr]
On a marginally related side note, please make sure that your registration and password reset password-entry fields all have the same length cutoff (e.g., 20 characters). The password reset field will take 30+ but the login field appears to accept only 20. This can lead to annoyances.[hr]
The generated report is totally rad. Did you have to beef up the server to handle the PDF generation on the fly? Many nice graphics.
Glad you like it. That’s for the tip on the password entry field. We are having some annoyances with that. I’m hoping you’ve spotted the cause. Don’t worry about negative. All feedback is good feedback.
The report generation on the fly. Yes, servers scale up based on demand (as I understand it - I’d have to task IT).