< Back

Reimagining Research Methods

Started May 2021

While creating a survey at IIT Guwahati on design education methods, I realized that data collection was quite broken.

The focus of these sketches is to see how we can use visualization during the process of data collection instead of as an afterthought.

Bubble sort questionnaires

Current systems to arrange and rate information on a scale of 1–5 or 1–10 are inaccurate and make it hard for people to make a meaningful choice.


A bubble sort based questionnaire would have O(n2) time complexity in the worst of cases, but the cognitive load is significantly lower than existing methodology.


In fact, I'd wager that it would take less time to finish this questionnaire than a ranking type question.

Rubberband sorting

Location is in important quantity in daily life—what if we used that in a 2 dimensional plane to identify important items to someone centered around a central point?


Radial distance = importance?


We could probably round up or down to the nearest integer to get more standardized data since being able to place a node anywhere on a canvas might not be very repeatable.


Reinterpreting the Likert

The Likert scale is often used to force people to make a choice (indeed, it's often called a 'forced choice' method) about their preferences and provide answers in a numerical format that can later be analyzed.


What about asking the same question a couple of times, while varying the scale that is available to choose from in order to gradually obtain their preferences in a more organic manner?

In the real world

As luck would have it, I had the chance to incorporate some parts of this research on a project we did at Clay Gorilla with Fistbump, a product that was attempting to bridge the comms gap between customers and users.


As part of our strategy to make the process of collecting feedback from customers less boring and shake them out of their existing models a bit, we implemented something similar to a rubberband sort to understand how connected they felt with the product.