Easy-to-navigate: quizzes
What is “easy quiz navigation”? What is its benefit to you?
When you create or take a quiz, you interact with its elements located on the screen. But this interaction can be organised in different ways.
Traditional approach
Schematically, the following illustration depicts the typical quiz layout on most app and website phone screens.
That is, the answer options have the form of buttons with labels.
Sometimes each element also has a separate button to play sound or read aloud, as shown in the illustration.
When problems arise
Most people are fine with this traditional layout, and it’s probably the only way to organise the elements of a quiz right now.
But sometimes it doesn’t work, and complications arise. When does this happen?
• If the answer options are verbose, the text may go beyond the buttons or simply be truncated.
• If users (with visual impairments, for example) increase the font size, then the text may also extend beyond the buttons or be truncated.
• If the quiz authors want the answers to be images, it doesn’t look very legible on small buttons.
All this complicates the perception of information and distracts you from the goal of passing the quiz, testing yourself.
But why is this so?
The reason for such shortcomings is the desire to fit all answer options on one screen at the same time.
Because of this, the buttons occupy a rather limited space. It is enough to comfortably fit one or few words but no more.
A pitfall of the traditional approach
While seeing all the answers at once is convenient for quiz writers, it also detracts from the quiz’s value as a memorisation method. How?
If you are confident in your knowledge, you check all the answer options until you get to the right one. Note: at the same time, you must separately keep the question in mind.
If you are not sure, then you can eliminate all, in your opinion, incorrect options, leaving one or several correct options in your brain, and then choose the most likely one from them, that is, guess the answer.
But this series of intense comparisons is unlikely to visually imprint the correct option in your memory.
Because it multiplies the information noise in your mind, in contrast to a simple visual comparison of the question and the answer option, one after another.
Innovative approach
Is there any way to solve these problems?
The following illustration depicts the schematic layout of the Everycards quiz.
That is, the answers have the form of a gallery of slides.
You scroll through these slides until you see the correct answer and then tap on it.
There is only one button to play sound or read aloud in Everycards. You can tap it to listen to the current answer option. Or tap the question first to listen to it the same way.
Slides take up all available screen space, and their proportions are the same as flashcards.
What are the advantages?
This innovative quiz control scheme gives you the following capabilities:
• Quiz answers can be texts, photos, and audio recordings — in any combination!
• Answers remain readable even if their length is a full sentence*.
• The size of the text can be increased without distorting its appearance (up to a certain limit).
• The number of answer options is limited only by practical sense, not by the free area of the screen.
• If you enable automatic playback of sounds or reading aloud, you can control the quiz without even looking at the screen. After some training, of course.
• Your brain focuses on comparing the question and the answer one by one, instead of the more energy-consuming traditional approach.
Of course, such an innovative scheme is a bit unusual. But many of the things that surround us now also once seemed strange and impractical to people.
So, are you against experimentation or not?
Try creating your own quiz at Everycards, then let your friends or family take it. In the Everycards Store you will find examples of ready-made quizzes on various topics.
One more (advanced) thing
By the way, the question of the Everycards quiz can also be made from several slides!
This is useful for presenting a wordy, complex question in small chunks. Or to enrich questions with photo or audio illustrations, etc.
But this is aerobatics that is unlikely to become your regular practice… 🤓 If this happens, the Everycards team takes off its hats!
Good luck and good studies!
*If the text is so long that it still gets truncated, Everycards has a button to temporarily expand the slide to full screen.
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