How intuitive to use image as an option in combo box?

Question

While designing a question for survey, we came across a multi choice question where responses(answer options) are mixture of both images and text i.e, A. Image B. Text C. Text D. image. Now we need to set score for the options. We select options in combo box and correspondingly set score for the option. (see image) My question is it intuitive to provide image as an option in combo box or is there any better alternatives for this?

Problem statement - I want to select response individually and set score for them. At the same time i don't want to throw all the options on the screen and bring up scroll!! thus a combo box is in picture. Any suggestions are welcome

Answer 1

I think its best to use Image (icon) + Text. The icon or image will support recognition rather than recall, and the text will further describe that option.

However, this depends on your domain and context. I don't know your domain but in some situations icon + text won't be the better solution. If you have art oriented website you can use images only, however, you should make sure that the users can understand the meaning of the images.

The best advice is to always test.

Answer 2

Having images in dropdown isn't the best practice,I can visualize two options here :

• I could definately have some text defined for each list item,let the list items be free of images,instead use the space below the dropdown to load a related image with the dropdown selection inside a fixed div that would help to avoid scroll(which is your requirement) and then set score for that item and change the selection.
• Second option would be to show the image on hovering over a selected list item.