Hey there,
We’re trying to create a Prototype for a News Site. For that we want to let the reader chose, what topics are in his or her interest. We plan to provide 5 categories from which the user can choose up to 3. After the topics are picked, we want to give them articles that include the 3 chosen topics on the next page.
But we have troubles realizing that in Axure.
If anyone has some clues, we would be more than grateful!
Thank you,
Ina
Here are a couple good solutions for a multi-select droplist:
There are many ways you could “give them articles” based on their choices… Depends if you want to link to a separate page with those articles, or maybe just show widgets with article titles (and links) on the same page, etc. I think it would help forum users here if you could provide some more details about how you’d like this to work–details of the user experience or desired look and feel, etc.
I honestly would not recommend a multiselect dropdown list, especially if it is for a responsive website that also has to work on mobile. Better to show it directly in tiles or on the screen with a description/image. And depending on how you implement things, some of these things are almost trivial to do in HTML, yet a lot harder to do in Axure. I agree with mbc66 in that we need more details.
Thank you for your answers!
To get more detailed:
We try to design a Choice Page, where the user finds 5 topics from which he oder she has to choose exactly 3. So we also need an Error-warning if less than 3 or more than 3 Topics are chosen. The 5 Topics are designed as clickable buttons. If the 3 are chosen, we want a button to pop up which leads the user to the next site, with a link. The next site includes prefabricated content, suitable to the chosen topics. We would design for each combination of the 5 topics a site.
So we need to have possibility to save the clicked buttons in a variable or something? And then maybe write an If-loop: “If the person chose A & B & C, button to the next site pops up, next site includes topics ABC”.
So the problem is how we can design the code, that it saves the selection of topics and leads then to the suitable site.
You could create 3 global variables, one for each user selection (e.g. “topic1”, “topic2”, “topic3”). This means you can access their choice throughout the prototype.
In terms of revealing the Next button once they reach enough choices, again you can use those global variables to check if all 3 have been filled (e.g. if none of the 3 equal “null” or whatever empty value you assign to them). So every time users select one topic, not only do you record that choice, but within the same click action you also check how many have been selected so far. If it’s the third choice, then show the button to continue.
You could also track the number of selected topics using a separate variable if it’s easier. Simply add/remove 1 on the total count when users change their selections. After each update to the total count, trigger the relevant action (e.g. if it’s less than 3 show a warning, else show a Next button).
Hope this helps in some way!