How to use Conditional Logic in surveys
Conditional Logic lets you create dynamic surveys that change what a respondent sees and what happens based on their responses. Essentially, you can create different actions triggered by different survey responses. Logic can be set to hide questions or instructions (skip logic), finish a survey early, redirect respondents to a URL on completion and set or append messages to the finish text depending on the respondent’s answers. Use Conditional Logic in surveys to get deeper insights and automate actions.
Some uses for conditional logic in surveys include:
- Improving the experience for survey respondents
- Getting testimonials when customers give you great feedback
- Getting notified instantly when you receive poor feedback
- Showing only relevant questions and hiding irrelevant questions
- Customising the messages that survey respondents see based on how they answer questions
- Categorising respondents based on their answers
- Redirecting respondents to different web pages on fnishing the survey
- Minimise receiving invalid feedback
- Disqualify people from taking the survey
- Endless other customising opportunities
Elements of Conditional Logic
In Survey Space, Conditional Logic is structured with three components: Actions, Triggers and Conditions.
Actions are what you want to happen when responses meet defined Conditions and Triggers. The Actions include:
- Hide selected content, e.g. questions or instructions (this is sometimes called skip logic)
- Finish the survey
- Redirect to a specified url on finish
- Change the finish message (HTML options are available)
- Append text to the finish message (HTML options are available)
- Send an email when the survey is complete (with or without the detailed results)
- Send a Slack notification when the survey is complete (with or without the detailed results)
- Tag the participant when the survey is complete
Triggers are defined responses to survey questions. Triggers can be set for either the current question or earlier questions. Each trigger has answer options to check against. These conditional logic options vary depending upon the question type. Triggers include:
- Is equal to/Is not equal to: Does a strict comparison with the answer. The answer supplied must exactly equal the selection. Multiple choice answers must have all and only the answers specified in the logic to fire. This option is not available for free text questions.
- Contains/Does not contain: This option is only available for free text responses. It checks to see if a response contains a word or sentence.
- Is one of/Is not one of: This is a non-strict equal to comparison and checks if answers contain certain responses.
- Is more than/Is less than: A comparator that is only available for Rating Scales questions. It checks to see if the answer is higher or lower than specified.
- Is more than or equal to/Is less than or equal to: The same as more than/less than but it includes the specified value.
Conditions contain one or multiple Triggers that, if met, will result in the Action. Conditions can be set to meet “any” or “all” triggers.
Make sure you carefully plan, test and pilot the conditional survey
Conditional Logic can be simple or quite complex depending upon the number of actions, conditions and triggers specified.
A conditional survey that uses conditional logic requires careful and meticulous planning, execution, testing and piloting in order to avoid errors and ensure the survey objectives are met.
Where possible, keep the logic steps as simple as possible.
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