Summary
At Vision Critical, I was the interaction design and usability lead for a community panel platform. One of the question types supported by this platform was a visual card sort question, where respondents are asked to drag cards with statements into buckets corresponding to e.g., satisfaction ratings. Customer input suggested that there was a strong need to improve the design such that survey authors could add images to the cards with or without text captions. My role was to integrate this new feature into the existing authoring and respondent experience and validate the design with users.
One challenge in the design process was optimizing the presentation of card sort objects once added to the buckets. Typically, authors add 5-7 buckets and traditionally these are presented in a vertical layout. However, the arrangement of buckets restricted the amount of real estate available for presenting items in the buckets, especially now that cards could contain images, which were best represented as thumbnails. The sketch above illustrates how both text and image cards could be represented in a bucket and positioned to optimize the number of cards that were visible above the fold. Sketches such as these provided a means of conveying design options that could be shared with stakeholders early in the design cycle.
