New Drag-and-Drop Interface for Q-Assessor

13 June 2011 - 04:40
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We’ve just added a new drag-and-drop Q-sort interface to Q-Assessor, and we’d appreciate feedback about its design and implementation. You can learn more about it, run a demo study, and compare it to our standard interface here.

The new interface runs on all current browsers — Firefox, Safari, Camino, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer versions 9, 8, 7, and 6. Unlike Flash-based systems, it does not require any particular plugins to be installed into participants’ browsers, and it even works (sort of) on iPads and iPhones. Modern hardware with sufficient memory and processor speed insures that the drag-and-drop motions are fluid. Like all web sites, it functions best with standards-compliant browsers (viz., anything besides Internet Explorer before IE9), but we’ve even managed to get IE6 to work, despite the fact that it is so far past its expiry date.

The design scales well to real-sized studies; some of our current users employ concourses with over 100 statements, and our new design fits into a standard screen size without scrolling. Investigators can configure their studies to use either our traditional interface or the new one. We’re gearing up to do another validation study comparing this new interface against our existing, previously-validated interface as well as paper sorts. We think that the drag-and-drop interface probably will replace our original one, but until it’s validated, we won’t know for sure.

The unique strength of Q-Assessor continues to be its integration of the entire Q process, including easy-to-use authoring tools, enrollment management, post-sort interviews, and immediate, online data analysis. The new drag-and-drop Q sort interface merely removes the main objection we’d been hearing about Q-Assessor — that it didn’t “look” like a “standard” Q experience. Now it does.

In addition to running the demo study, please sign up at our site and conduct your own study for free. The best way for you to see what Q-Assessor can do is to use it for a real project.

We’re glad to see the other new offerings under development out there, and the best way for you to evaluate them is to use them head-to-head for real studies. We really want your comparative feedback. Thanks!

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