Context Chips in Survey Design: “Okay, but how does it feel?”
The story of how a weird little UI to collect sentiment alongside survey responses defied constraints and triumphed over skepticism through usability testing.
One would think that we’ve more or less figured survey UI out by now. Multiple choice questions, checkbox questions, matrix questions, dropdown questions, freeform textfields, numerical scales, what more could one possibly need?!
And yet, every time Google sponsored me to lead one of the State Of … surveys, and especially the inaugural State of HTML 2023 Survey, I kept hitting the same wall; I kept feeling that the established options for answering UIs were woefully inadequate for balancing the collection good insights with minimal friction for end-users.
The State Of surveys used a completely custom survey infrastructure, so I could often (but not always) convince engineering to implement new question UIs. After joining Font Awesome, I somehow found myself leading yet another survey, despite swearing never to do this again. 🥲 Alas, building a custom survey UI was simply not an option in this case; I had to make do with the existing options out there [1], so I felt this kind of pain to my core once again.
So what are these cases where the existing answering UIs are inadequate, and how could better ones help? I’m hoping this case study to be Part 1 of a series around how survey UI innovations can help balance tradeoffs between user experience and data quality, though this is definitely the one I’m most proud of, as it was such a bumpy ride, but it was all worth it in the end.
Unlike Devographics, surveys are not FA’s core business, so the Impact/Effort tradeoff simply wasn’t there for a custom UI, at least at this point in time. I ended up going with Tally, mainly due to the flexibility of its conditional logic and its support for code injection (which among other things, allowed me to use FA icons — a whopping 120 different ones!). ↩︎