I second TurboTax's pattern of expanding questions further down the process, rather than making a given task (page) longer with expanded questions in-line.
Their design is usable (to me) because it doesn't try to keep track of which questions tie back to previous answers. The process just gets a little bit longer. The wording on follow-up questions is suggestive of the answer that produced it, but they don't try to force the UI to say "Following up from question 3, 12 pages back, here are some more questions:" They just present you with a well-designed page that treats the topic in its own right, without extra crud used to reinforce the arbitrary process flow. That is, I would go with asking the detailed questions later, but I wouldn't try to ensure people could tell which answers spawned the new questions. Just make sure they know they're coming, have a general idea (or specific, if possible) of how much longer it will take (especially as/if that changes during the process), and let each page be usable in its own right. I follow this pattern with my current project, wherein users must complete several independent forms in sequence, some of which change depending on previous responses. I have found while observing users, that it is more important to make the current page clear and usable, than to make sure they knew why they had extra questions to answer. Oh yeah, I believe TurboTax also provides an alternate "site map" while the process unfolds, so you can see new forms as they appear, and jump around to change the process, mid-flight. Might be helpful for your purposes, as it's available off to the side, but not really "in your face". Good luck =] Bryan Minihan Phone: 919-428-4744 Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanminihan Resume: http://www.bryanminihan.com/resume.html Web Portfolio: http://www.bryanminihan.com/portfolio.html Blog: http://www.bryanminihan.com/blog/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leah Ellison Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 7:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Long Online Application and Chunking with Several Pages Your description of the project reminded me of TurboTax's online tax forms. I use that service faithfully every year, and there are a million questions (which will display more questions depending on how you answer). I'm sure they struggled with not being allowed to cut questions also. They have organized the forms in a way that in not intimidating. As I said, I faithfully come back year after year because the process is faster and less painful then paper. I don't recall exactly how they have the parent/child questions set up. I want to say it differs depending on the number of questions. For example: If a parent question leads to 2 or 3 child questions, then those are displayed under the parent. If the parent questions leads to more than 4 or more child questions, those are moved to a new page where the parent question becomes the main heading. In any case, their strategy works well. It might be a model worth investigating. Good luck! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48008 ________________________________________________________________ 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
