Good way to select a few items out of several dozens ones

Question

The company recently sent a survey that featured a view that asked me to select up to 10 attributes out of a list of 60-70 ones. The selection list was displayed as big toggleable buttons, about 10 rows x 6 columns of them.

I began reading them and toggling what I found applicable, but by the time I reached half of the list I got 10 selected. This meant that for each applicable future selected item I had to unselect an already selected one. This in turn meant to scan across multiple rows and columns to find an appropriate item to deselect.

This does not seem like a good UX and I want to make a suggestion to improve the UX so that they get a higher response rate and more meaningful results.

One idea is to have a separate column where all selected attributes are displayed, which also allows them to be draggable. That allows the user to easily sort them and spend less time kicking out one item when a better one is found.

Any ideas about how to tackle such a view?

Answer 1

This indeed is not good UX. Your solution would somewhat reduce at least one problem (searching in the huge list of attributes to find the one you want to unselect). In addition this could be difficult if used on mobile devices (if that's the case).

But the problem starts earlier. To pick 10 attributes out of 70 you would have to remember all the 70 attributes, which is outright impossible.

One solution could be to group the attributes and then ask the user to select attributes per group. This would make things easier for the user but does not give the same output if the user can choose between all the attributes.

Another possibility would be to let the user select as many attributes as wanted. In this case, a user does not have to decide for each item if this is more important than another, the question is only 'is it important or not'.

After this first round there would be less items to get the 10 items needed. You could get the user to order the items from more important to less important (which still is a pain if a user has selected a lot of attributes in the first round). Another way is to edit the second list so that the user has to remove the least important items until there are 10 items left.

Either way, splitting up the task in two steps would probably make it much easier to the user.