Published April 27, 2021

Pineapple on Pizza and Other Cosmic Journeys in Rank Order Questions

3 min read

Through iteration the ZURB team released Rank Order questions for Helio (Insert Edit for Ben)

Traversing the cosmos is fraught with dangers. There’s peril at every turn. And someone might want to do something like put pineapple on your space pizza delivery. Well, let them… pineapple on pizza is amazing.

But we’re brave space explorers here and we’ve gone sailed the stars from end-to-end in bringing back the best method of Rank Order questions.

Asking your audience to rank items or lists of features is a great way to know which ones they prioritize. And that helps you figure out which ones to tackle first.

That’s why we got into our starships and set off for the best way to bring Rank Order questions into Helio.

Seeking the Signal 📡

Bringing Ranking to Helio was all about the signal. And…

"Can't stop the signal" from Serenity.

We wanted to let everyone collect more signals from their audiences out there in the cosmos. Better, stronger signals. The more signals you get, the clearer a picture you’ll get on how your audience ranks an assortment of items.

Of course, we aligned our array carefully to get those signals. We had to run a level one diagnostic on all systems.

Most important, was aligning the Ranking experience for you with our own Helio tenets:

  • Fast
  • Scalable
  • Mobile-friendly

Once we aligned our goals, we embarked on a perilous odyssey across the Helio cosmos to find the right method of ranking… and, of course, space pizza!

A Journey Fraught With Dangers ⚔️

The first peril we encountered was a drag-and-drop option. Here’s an early idea of what drag-and-drop looked like.

Here, participants would drag the toppings and drop them in the order from best to worst.

We experimented with paring drag-and-drop with a number input, but this made things wack and complicated. It’s confusing and not very mobile friendly.

This is our mobile-unfriendly version:

Button? Button? Who’s got the radio button? A radio button matrix was another version we explored.

Radio buttons are really common in surveys so participants understanding how to respond isn’t an issue here. They’re also easy to build and we could have built off of our MaxDiff component.

The drawbacks: it’s visually overwhelming and even with five choices, takes up a lot of screen real-estate. Not very mobile friendly.

So we fled back into the unknown searching for another solution.

Our next encounter… a stepper. Participants must tap the arrows to position their choices. Sure, it’s mobile-friendly and easy to use but the toggling also makes it a drawback.

In other words, a ton of toggling. For instance, to get pineapples to the top from the very bottom, you’d have to toggle 4 times. Then futz with the other toppings to get your ranking.

Talk about a time suck into a dimension of toggling.

And now we come to our final exploration… our destination at last… the tap.

Asking participants to “tap” items into the order they preferred was a snap! Far less perilous than our previous stops along the Helio cosmos.

A friendly take on Rank Order questions that’s mobile friendly and the one you’ve brought back for your audiences to use.

We even celebrated with space pizza with pineapples on top.

Plant Your Exploration Flag on A Ranking Of Your Own đźš©

We really hope that you enjoy Rank Order questions in Helio and would love to know what you think. We’ve made it easy to give Helio a try with our open audience link.

With our Conversion User Test Kit, you can see how you can improve your products and give Ranking a try!

And check out some of our testing templates! They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes while making it quick and easy for you to create your tests. This one is especially fun for food!

Ingredients & Flavors Test

Get to the bottom of your audience’s taste buds with a quick survey to dig into their culinary practices and preferences.

Use this template for:

  • Concept Testing
  • Discovering Users’ Taste Preferences
  • Finding Foods That Peak Interests
Use Template

Build something your users truly want