Best UI pattern to group multiple uncategorised items (i.e. questions)

Question

Problem: User has an ability to add x number of questions (uncategorized questions). Normally, user adds 2 - 5 questions. However, the problem is when the user add more than 10. The tricky part that I haven't thought of how to implement is when they add 200 questions.

The current implementation was just to stack up together the questions so user can easily make some changes to all questions. However, if that is more than 10 question, user needs to scroll down which is tedious but still works. But with 200 questions, that's like unlimited scrolling.

Some solutions I thought:

Pagination This definitely is not a good solution. It's confusing. I was thinking maybe there's a good way to make use of pagination though so maybe you have some ideas.

Checkbox Table I think this approach could be possible. The problem though is user can't easily make some changes on the question. In addition, that means I would have another functionality of adding groups. There are possible workflow changes to suit this kind of approach but can't think of any yet at the moment.

Note: The user can select the type of question he wants to add: multiple choice or essay-type.

I'm currently exploring on the best solution and to be honest, I haven't really thought of any design approach to take yet. Would love to know our thoughts if you encountered something similar.

Answer 1

Trying to group uncategorized items seems rather contradictory. On the one hand you want to reduce the cognitive load for the user, but if there is no logical grouping then you are spending effort without necessarily being able to gain much as a result.

I think a solution might be to allow the user to create their own logical groupings. This can happen before they create the questions (if they have some idea of what the groupings are going to be) or after they create the questions when it becomes a bit more apparent.

Seems like the best solution is to take the 'divide and conquer' approach of putting limitations on the user rather than not setting any limits that can be sensibly managed (same with browser tabs that people keep opening up).

Answer 2

When you reffer to user can't easily make some changes on the question. what do it really means? If you are talking about making changes to the question body itself then I am OK with Michael Lai's answer about setting limits to the amount of questions that the user can add or manage. But if you are talking about some other general operations upon the questions, like select, delete, reorder, download or the kind, then the best approach, to me, is to create a button set to accomplish those tasks. There are plenty of options for this but the most common are the bottom nav bar or the floating buttons. You can implement a unique bottom right floating button which triggers a floating picker which will contain all the possible actions. Keep in mind to settle a wide horizontal space and color difference between the positive and the potentially destructive actions. This is an example of this approach: