entering a list of data, best practices

Question

I'm making a mobile app in which the user is asked to enter a list of data. There is a list of roads and the user has to specify how frequently he/she uses each of the roads in the list.

The main goal is to make the interface simple and quick for people of all ages and characteristics.

I was thinking about either splitting the list into screens, and putting some usable, eye-catching element to set the data, or making a list, each item of which is draggable, so the user can simply drag the item over another to set the ratio. Or even compare every road with each other, asking for which is the most used. There will be 5-7 possible items on the list.

Here is what I have come up with so far. Any improvements?

Answer 1

Agree with Alexey that it is not intuitive to look at a round dial and recollect frequency of use of something. A better way is to provide a week of dates and ask user to mark the days they cross a particular road. Maybe even a format similar to music equalizer, with each scroll bar a day/road. And slide for a scale of something like "for sure" "likely" "not likely" usage meter.

Answer 2

It's hard for the user to identify the exact % of street usage. It's not only math, but psychology reasons. So it should be better to provide categorical scale of street usage: from frequent (everyday) to rare roads.

If you are interesting in exact % you could let the device itself collect location data.

Answer 3

I think you absolutely need to test any approach you consider using because of the complexity of what you are asking: you're asking people to provide quite a lot of detail. For usability, I would consider breaking the task into 2: Firstly, get people to drag and drop into a list to create an order (most to least). Then, ask them if they could indicate the amount for each road. This will be a simpler problem for most people making it more likely that they'll do it.