I am making a school webapp. Teachers have an editor from which they can create exercises. Exercises are meant to be used to create exams/assignments, or they can be made publicly available to students who can search them and generate quizzes on their own for practicing.
An exercise an be in either of three visibility states, as per the above: draft, exams only, or public.
This is what the editor looks like:
As you can see, the exercise visibility is set using a dropdown; this is what it looks like when expanded:
After months of usage of the application by several teachers, I've noticed that they often tend to forget correctly setting the visibility once they're done with editing an exercise. This results in some frustration as they usually realize when they're creating an exam and are prevented by the system from inserting the exercise because it's still in draft state.
This happens due to several reasons:
- as soon as it's created, the exercise cannot be in a state other than draft. If a teacher attemps to change the state to anything else before they have filled in the mandatory fields, like the exercise text, they get an error message acting as an interlock
- the editor can get pretty tall, for example when a lot of choices are added to the exercise
- the dropdown is at the beginning of the editor, so current flow requires the teacher to go down on the editor to create the choices and whatnot, and then get back up to set the visibility once they're done
I'm looking for a way to make this simpler. One solution could've been to have a "publish" button at the bottom of the editor, but in my case it wouldn't work because the states the exercises could be moved to from draft are two, not just one. Also note that they are both equally important and equally likely to be selected, so I can't just have a main button with a secondary possible action. One thing that stops me from moving the dropdown altogether to the bottom is that teachers go back to old exercises pretty often to move them from "exams only" to "public" after they've been used in an exam, and it wouldn't be very handy to have to scroll down all the way to find the action--it would probably push teachers away from wanting to do it too often.
What's a way I could make this action more prominent to prevent teachers from forgetting about doing it once they're done with editing?
