Have you thought of doing a survey and having people self-identify their occupation? No constraints, just a text field (or two- one for industry and one for occupation). You could even do it as a fill in the blank, eg, "I work as a _____ in the ______ industry." You'd need a fairly large sample size, but it sounds like you may be working with a well-defined audience.
Once you have a large list of how people think of their industry and occupation, you can normalize it and that becomes your list. You're never going to have a truly exhaustive list, though (unless you're dealing with a very constrained system), so the choice becomes having people not answer or answer incorrectly, vs having an optional "not listed" selection and having them write-in their occupation if they don't see it on the list. The first means you'll get less accurate data, the second means you'll get more data that will be hard to do anything with, so there are trade-offs either way. Good luck! --Amy Jones -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Trumble Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 9:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Designing a long list of items that people mustchoose from. All: I'm looking for some advice, examples or even recommendations of who might be good at solving this particular problem for us. In the context of a longish multi-page web form we have a need for the user to tell us at a fairly granular level what their occupation is. the total length of the list is long, more than 1,000 choices. The accuracy of the answer is pretty important to our business as is our desire not to stop the users flow through the application because of either the difficulty or perceived intrusiveness of the question. I should add that most users don't view the question as being necessary based on their understanding of what they are filling out. Currently we use an introductory question (labeled currently 'industry', but in the past 'line of work' - the better version) to narrow down the list of occupations that are presented to the individual. This approach may well be the best solution to a difficult problem, but it brings a little emotional and cognitive overhead with it. Regularly when we observe users they will grumble that we are asking the same question twice, less so with the 'line of work' label I believe. Part of the problem with we have with this approach is that the choices in the industry list are not very good. The selections for industry are confusing and users don't always grasp that if their occupation is not showing up as a choice the solution to the problem might be to choose a different industry. The actual list has some regulatory constraints and a fair amount of internal political baggage. We are looking for a way to develop a new taxonomy that might make the process more understandable to the user, while preserving the level of detail the business requires. Card-sorting doesn't seem like a good tool here since ultimately we need to know how individual users categorize their own occupation, not how they classify a list of occupations with which they have varying degrees of familiarity. Because of the regulatory constraints we can't experiment with different versions of the list at any given time. We've used surveys to test particular taxonomies in the past. Generally surveys have proved a good way to rule things out, not develop something that works well. What thoughts do you all have on this? I really haven't found any examples of folks who do something similar well. I'm interested in advice, or if you know someone (or if you are someone) who could do a good job of putting a new taxonomy together that would be good too. We may well have to bring in the magic aura of expertise that only consultants possess in order to sell any changes. You can email me directly or reply to the list. Thanks in advance. Paul Trumble -- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. - Groucho Marx http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ http://www.twitter.com/trumbling ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
