We have a lot of very serious-sounding concerns.

Quiet Babylon

Surely there is a good reason for this?

Thursday December 4, 2008 by Tim Maly

This is from a popular (and reasonably well funded) survey company.

Is there a good reason for the layout of the buttons, or did no one over there look at the entire screen?

 
  • Jon
    I don't see what you're talking about.
  • The arrows.
  • Jon
    Ah, to me it wasn't even clear those were the buttons! I was all "I don't see any buttons." That is pretty bad.
  • Momomoto
    I've thought about that quite a lot, too, and it does rub me the wrong way.

    My theory is that the majority of the questions line up along the left side of the screen so, even though it breaks every HCI guideline known to mankind, there's far less mouse travel if you put the arrow there.
  • If you tab through the questions, this arrangement means that you end up on the NEXT arrow first. But it surprises me that they'd lay it out for people tabbing through questions.
  • Mark
    I think it's to make sure you're reading the questions rather than randomly clicking and hitting next, by putting next on the left side of the screen, they increase their chances of getting accurate responses
  • That's a really interesting suggestion that I had not considered.

    In one especially long survey, one of the questions was "This is to make sure you are still reading, please select '2' as the answer." So there is evidence that they share your concern about accuracy!
blog comments powered by Disqus

Stay in Touch

About Quiet Babylon

A website about cyborgs & architects. Long posts on Mondays, updates throughout the week.

New? Start Here

These posts lay out the general attitude.

6 Posts I’m Proud Of

Search:

Creative Commons License
Quiet Babylon is by Tim Maly and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License 2007-2010. Just about all of the photographs are Creative Commons Images from flickr. Click on them to link back to their creators. Theme based on Fluid Solution theme ported to Wordpress by Kaushal Sheth, design by Arcsin. Hilariously, I got rid of the "fluid" part of the fluid solution and have since hacked away a lot of the rest of the original design. But that's not the creator's fault. It's a great theme.