Poll options.

[pythonmegapixel]

1. The tickbox labelled "Multiple choice question?" is a little confusing. A multiple choice question usually just means a question which gives you multiple options to choose from, rather than being a free-form answer, but here it's being used to mean that more than one option can be selected by the user. There is also a spurious question mark at the end, which none of the other tickboxes have.
   
   Could this possibly be rephrased to "Allow more than one option to be chosen"
   
    
2. Is it feasible to implement the ability to rearrange poll options once you've typed them? I can imagine something like a little icon to the right of each text box which you can click and drag to move the option up or down.

[LogicalDrm]

Please re-read your first question/point. You are conflicting with yourself there.

 

"multiple choices" means answering participants can choose more than one answer. I have no idea what you mean by "rather than being free-form". Free-form would be reply to your topic. It's not like forum threads would be feasible for questionnaire purposes anyway. So that's working as intended.

 

Also other tick boxes do have question marks ("Make voter names public?" and "Automatically close poll on specific date?").

 

I would like to add as suggestion that poll title should be optional when there's only one poll question presented.

[pythonmegapixel]

4 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

Please re-read your first question/point. You are conflicting with yourself there.

 

"multiple choices" means answering participants can choose more than one answer. I have no idea what you mean by "rather than being free-form". Free-form would be reply to your topic. It's not like forum threads would be feasible for questionnaire purposes anyway. So that's working as intended.

I'm talking about in the real world, not on the forum. By "rather than being free form" I mean that the term "Multiple choice" is generally used to distinguish a question where the user is presented with options to choose from, whether multiple answers are allowed or not, from a question where they are allowed to enter their own text. I know we don't have those questions on the forum poll system, but they exist in other systems.

 

For example, here's a screenshot of Google Forms:

:

 

Here you can see that "Multiple choice" means a radio-button style arrangement where you can only select one option at once. This is in line with most other uses I have seen of the term "multiple choice".

 

Here's Microsoft Forms, which behaves in a similar. but slightly different, way:

 

Here, multiple choice is the option for any multiple choice question, whether multiple answers are allowed or not. There is a separate toggle thingy at the bottom right for "Multiple answers". But here, they still accept that a multiple choice question is any multiple choice question, whether multiple answers are allowed or not.

 

Now yes, there are some exceptions, but the point is that it's ambiguous. What I suggested removes that ambiguity, and therefore improves the UX just that tiny bit. And those tiny bits really add up.

 

Even just "Allow multiple choices" would make more sense, why not change it to that?

 

4 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

Also other tick boxes do have question marks ("Make voter names public?" and "Automatically close poll on specific date?").

Well, why? The vast majority of settings windows I've seen don't have question marks, because they're redundant - it's not a question; it's a sentence describing the behaviour, and then the checkbox to enable that behaviour.

 

4 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

I would like to add as suggestion that poll title should be optional when there's only one poll question presented

Agreed. In fact, the poll title should be optional anyway, as more often than not it's the same as the thread.

[LogicalDrm]

15 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I'm talking about in the real world, not on the forum. By "rather than being free form" I mean that the term "Multiple choice" is generally used to distinguish a question where the user is presented with options to choose from, whether multiple answers are allowed or not, from a question where they are allowed to enter their own text. I know we don't have those questions on the forum poll system, but they exist in other systems.

15 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Even just "Allow multiple choices" would make more sense, why not change it to that?

Ok, I think I understand what you mean (still the explanation isn't very informative for non-native English speaker). You are trying to say that wording it "multiple choice" is odd to you and it should be "multiple answers" instead. Because for me (as example) a question in a poll is automatically "choose one" and the alternative would be "choose multiple" or "choose from scale" etc. It wouldn't be poll question if you could only choose from one answer.

 

Though thinking it further, the translations from Finnish to English would support your argument. Our "monivalinta" means "choose from many". But the way its usually used is for questions with 3 or more answer possibilities.

 

15 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Well, why? The vast majority of settings windows I've seen don't have question marks, because they're redundant - it's not a question; it's a sentence describing the behaviour, and then the checkbox to enable that behaviour.

They are questions to one making the poll. Yes, an argument could be made that they don't need to be. But since you are first to note it after this poll system has been in place for 5+ years, I'm interested to see if anyone else has strong feelings about making them statements rather than questions.

[pythonmegapixel]

54 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I'm interested to see if anyone else has strong feelings about making them statements rather than questions.

Really it's no massive deal - it just looks a little wrong to me. If I was designing it, I wouldn't have the question marks, but I don't think it's as confusing as the other issues we've mentioned, particularly the fact that a single-question poll effectively has 3 titles (Thread title, poll title, question title)

[colonel_mortis]

On 12/27/2020 at 9:50 PM, pythonmegapixel said:

The tickbox labelled "Multiple choice question?" is a little confusing. A multiple choice question usually just means a question which gives you multiple options to choose from, rather than being a free-form answer, but here it's being used to mean that more than one option can be selected by the user. There is also a spurious question mark at the end, which none of the other tickboxes have.

Could this possibly be rephrased to "Allow more than one option to be chosen"

That makes sense, I've changed all of them to not have question marks and have rephrased the multiple choice option.

On 12/27/2020 at 9:50 PM, pythonmegapixel said:

Is it feasible to implement the ability to rearrange poll options once you've typed them? I can imagine something like a little icon to the right of each text box which you can click and drag to move the option up or down.

This would be a lot more involved, so it won't be feasible for me to change.

[pythonmegapixel]

@colonel_mortisWhat's happened to the option to make a question not required? It seems to not be showing up any more.

[colonel_mortis]

32 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

@colonel_mortisWhat's happened to the option to make a question not required? It seems to not be showing up any more.

I don't think that ever existed.

[pythonmegapixel]

3 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

I don't think that ever existed.

Sorry, you're quite right. I was confusing it with another forum that I am on, which does have a required question option.

 

Though that would be a good feature to add, if you have the time...