On the Insiders call in September, we shared designs for upcoming improvements for Select question types. We want to enhance the user experience for two main reasons:
- Make selecting options easier and more intuitive to use
- Align the experience between Collect and our new ODK Web Forms
As users have noted, selects can be tricky to interact with. For example, in Collect, radio buttons and checkboxes give you the impression that you need to tap the radio or checkbox button precisely, but you don't. The entire line containing the select option is tappable!
To make selects more intuitive, we'll be following a UX principle called Fitts's Law to make touch targets bigger, well-spaced, and placed where they are easy to reach.
We're going to make the selected state more prominent by using a highlighted blue container. This will help users easily identify which elements are grouped together (e.g., checkbox and image) and are interactive. We want to ensure enough spacing between options so the content doesn’t feel cramped, while balancing the need to optimize for smaller screens where options might fall off the screen.
We're also improving select multiple with fixed columns and selects with media. We hope these changes make selections more intuitive for enumerators.
Our new Web Forms will have many of these improvements too because we want selects to look the same whether you are using the app or a web browser.
We’d love your feedback, especially if you think these changes might affect any of your forms. If so, please let us know how and share an example.
Interested in what's next? Check out our product roadmap.