Recently, I got an email from a vendor of the vendor my employer uses for IT support. Another “rate us” survey… (sigh) I usually take a few minutes a do my civic duty on these. I’ve been on the other end of it and sympathize with the challenge of quantifying something that is very subjective.
My Gut Reaction
When I first came to the web site for the survey I recoiled a little. The buttons were in a weird place, and there was way more text than most people would read, even someone with a big heart for the surveying people of the world.
My Enlightened Opinion
As I moved through the survey, I started to turn around. I was pleased when I realized:
- Left aligning buttons on the page made for faster navigation than traditional right-bottom placement because I didn’t need to move my mouse from the left margin all the way to the right side of my screen to move forward. I happened to be doing the survey at my desk with external 4:3 monitors (not wide screen), but this reduction in task elapsed time would have been more pronounced had I been using the wider screen resolution of the laptop’s display with touch pad instead of an external mouse.
- Radio button labels or some space around them were also clickable. If you don’t know why this matters, do a web search for “Fitts Law”. There were cases where the background colors made me think a space to the right of the label was also click-able, but it wasn’t.
- The banded rows made it easier to distinguish choices, but would have preferred something visual to break-up two choices on the same line. If the choices on the same line wouldn’t “pop” then more pages of fewer questions where all the choices are in a single column would have been my preference. My theory is that a task is easier to complete with more steps that require less effort than fewer steps that require more effort.
In conclusion, I feel that some “traditional” patterns were broken that improved the experience of completing the survey. However, some “old standards” were still needed. What do you think?
