Feature Focus: Introducing Drag and Drop, Free Text Questions, and Instructional Tasks in the Lab Builder

I’m excited to announce the latest updates to the Lab Builder. Today, we’ve introduced three new task types:

• Drag and drop
• Free-text questions
• Informational/instructional

These exciting new task features will enhance the flexibility and interactivity of your labs, offering even more engaging learning experiences.

The new tasks can be added to your lab as usual via the Tasks library.

They’re live now, so you can start adding them to your labs right away.

Drag and drop

Drag-and-drop is a dynamic, interactive task. Designed to challenge the user's recognition and matching abilities, it’s perfect for testing their knowledge in various subjects.

This task type consists of text-based items and targets. Users need to drag the items to the correct corresponding targets. It’s easy to add and edit items and targets in the Lab Builder quickly. You can have a minimum of two items and a maximum of 12. 

You could use the drag-and-drop task type for questions and answers, completing sentence fragments, or matching terms with definitions.

Once added to your lab, the new task will appear as follows:

Free-text questions

This task type requires the user to manually enter text to answer a question. For this task type, you need to write a question and provide at least one possible answer – but there can be multiple correct answers. You can configure this easily in the Lab Builder.

Fuzzy matching automatically detects answers that are close enough to the correct answer. For example, if the user submits the right answer with a minor spelling error, it’ll still be accepted. This is designed to reduce user frustration and is enabled by default. You can disable fuzzy matching by turning off the toggle at the bottom.

Finally, you can also provide feedback to users if they get an answer wrong, sort of like a hint. This is useful if you want to help point your user in the right direction and prevent them from getting stuck.

Instructional tasks

This task type is designed to provide users with vital information, guidelines, or instructions. In the Lab Builder, they have the same configuration options as the Briefing panel.

Instructional tasks are particularly useful in explaining what the user is expected to do in a following task, presenting story details, or providing a learning journey for users as they go through the lab.

You may want to remind users about specific information they need to answer some tasks or tell them to log into an application. The example below reminds users to refer to a specific part of the briefing panel before answering the next questions.

Why are these new features useful?

• Increased engagement: These new question types introduce a gamified element to your custom labs, making learning more interactive and enjoyable.
• Versatile content creation: These features expand the possibilities for creating diverse and engaging labs, allowing you to tailor your content to your organization's unique needs.

Enhanced learning: Drag and drop encourages active recall and association, while free text questions promote critical thinking and deeper understanding.

Go and build some engaging labs!

Explore the possibilities and build labs that truly engage your users!

For more guidance, visit our Help Center, where there’s ample documentation on using the Lab Builder in more detail.