Tips for building an Exercise form - v6.9+

This article outlines some tips for building Exercise forms within the Assessment Module. It is recommended that you familiarise yourself with the content outlined in Assessment Module Administration - Creating an Exercise v6.9+ before reading this article. 

Consider engaging a usability expert in order to ensure that recognised design principles are followed. In general, users will not enjoy navigating through long pages, so consolidate where possible and provide overview and guidance text where appropriate. 

Think about how much information should be contained within a given section. For example, you could include 3 or 4 lists in a section if you expect each list to include a small number of items. However, if you expect the lists to include a large number of items, you may want to separate them out into different sections 

If you have capacity, it can be good practice to carry out testing with a sample of users. This can provide helpful insight and allow you to make adjustments prior to rolling out the Exercise form to other users. 

When configuring item supporting fields for ‘custom field list’ items - It is recommended that all fields are set to ‘Summary’ so that they are displayed on the ltem summary. You may wish to exclude text fields that are intended to capture large volumes of text. It is also recommended that you include at least one key field.  

Note: A number of changes were made to the behaviour of stage transitions in Elements v6.10. Please see the article - Configuring stage transitions v6.10+ for more information. 

We recommend you allow users to indicate that they have completed adding information to an Exercise form - either by enabling the ability to ‘Mark as done’ OR by implementing the ability for the user to carry out a stage transition. 

• ‘Mark as done’ - This will flag the Exercise form as done. This flag will be displayed to users and managers. This approach allows managers to move Exercise forms that have been marked as done between stages.

• ‘Stage transitions’ - Configuring the Exercise definition so that users can move the stage of the Exercise allows users to move the stage of the Exercise. This could move the Exercise form directly into a review stage, where it will become instantly available for review. Alternatively, you could allow users to move the exercise into a holding stage. The Exercise form would then be moved into downstream stages by managers.  

A good way of exploring how the exercise will look to users is to create an Exercise definition and add yourself as a user. Set the exercise to ‘Active’ and you will be able to view the Exercise. You can open two tabs - One for the exercise form and the other for the Exercise definition page. 

As you configure the exercise you can refresh the Exercise form and see how the information you have added and configuration options will be surfaced to users. It is possible to extend this approach by adding yourself as a reviewer to one of the stages. This process can be carried out on a production instance, as no non-admin users will have access to the Exercise.

You can also start by using one of the out-of-the-box Assessment templates and make modifications to the template to help get a feel for the process.  

By testing the layout you can ensure that the configurable overview and guidance text displays exactly how you want it to. We recommend that this information is kept as concise as possible. 

The ‘Exercise’ overview and guidance text is shown on its own ‘Introduction’ page and should be used to provide context to the data collection process for users and reviewers. The ‘Introduction’ page is always displayed, so if no text is configured an empty page will be displayed. 

Important: The module can be used to collect personal information about the user completing the Exercise form. You should ensure that you explain the purpose of the data collection processes and may want to consider linking through to any organisational resources on data privacy and data reuse. 

Exercise Definitions can be cloned. This means that you can effectively create your own templates. These can then be cloned and modified to meet specific use cases.