This week I proposed a solution for a questionnaire building app, taking my personal revenge on a recent project.
There are several free tools which I’ve been using for this, and some of them are fairly good in terms of available features and ease of use. However, I found myself dealing with some really annoying constraints which slowed down my work.
We considered the process, which was the creation of an interactive form for social research, as well as a few basic features: control over the document architecture, selection of question type, and the ability to navigate questions and pages.
If you want to try this weeks week’s example, do your design now (no more than 10 minutes) and then continue reading.
Our solutions focused around two different structures: a single screen view and a wizard view. These two approaches reflect the need to keep a usually long journey under control. While the wizard breaks the form down into several steps, the single screen allows the user to have a view over the whole document. In other words, the first approach helps the user focus on one element at a time, where as the second approach shows the process in its entirety, giving an immediate outlook on the questionnaire.
Image may be NSFW.
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Almost each design included a bar with a graphical overview of the document architecture in its structure. The position of the bar (on top or at a side of the screen) curiously mirrors the software applications for document editing we are familiar with (i.e. Pages, Word and Keynote). The ability to drag-and-drop as a preferred control for adding/removing elements was frequently mentioned. The tool for selecting the question style options presented very different solutions.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Firstly, we saw a distinction between the selection at question level and at answer level. So, while in some designs the answer type is determined by the question, others let the user choose the answer format independent of the question type. For the option selection we all choose a drop down menu to keep the interface simple.
The skip/jump option has been presented mainly as a graphical selection of the elements, single questions and pages. This solution seems to work effectively to build side paths along the questionnaires linear journey.
In conclusion, there were some interesting points raised about the viewing mode. Solutions focusing on graphical controls also used a wysiwyg view mode while other viewing modes had a preview button.
