Survey Programming

• Productivity: By applying survey logic tactics, you can create a number of surveys in a matter of minutes. It reduces the time you need to create questions. Just like by applying logic in software programming, you can achieve more with less code, in survey programming you can collect more data with relatively less number of questions. One can use the question library, copy questions from the same survey or a different survey to reuse the question set.
• Efficiency: The purpose behind using a survey software is to design, distribute and analyze data smartly. Such software comes with rich features that reduce the time to do market research. It reduces the effort drastically as compared to traditional means of data collection. With survey programming, you can collect more information about your target audience with less number of questions.
• Conciseness: If you use a survey creation software efficiently, the survey questionnaire will be very concise. This also improves the experience of respondents as they have to answer a lesser number of questions. There are many methods to make the questionnaire concise using survey building software. With survey logic and programming, it becomes possible to present the same question based on the respondent’s answer. Thus, the survey creator doesn’t have to create different questions for different scenarios.
• Simplicity: Concise surveys are simple yet powerful. Because of the way they collect data, generating insights from data analytics gets very simple. With survey programming software, you can manage the market research campaign with minimum human intervention. For instance, you can schedule the distribution of invitation email at a specific time. Also, you can create a question list in your preferred language and launch a survey based on the respondent’s language.

Survey programming can be applied in a number of ways to increase the effectiveness of the survey. Market researches should make the most of the below features available in the survey creation tool.

1. Skip Logic: Skip logic moves respondents to a different question or page on the basis of their selection of an option in the current question. This feature can take respondents to a different question in the survey or skip some questions. You can define custom rules to create a path for each respondent based on their responses. For instance, a hotel can ask customers if they enjoyed their meals or not. In this case, the first question would be if he/she had meals or not.
   

   
   Based on the answer, the respondent can be presented a question on the restaurant or the hotel.
   

   
2. Compound/Delayed Branching: With simple branching or skip logic, you cannot program a survey based on responses to multiple questions. Also, the logic is executed immediately with simple branching. With compound branching, you can set multiple criteria on a single question. With delayed branching, you can use responses of previous questions to decide which question should be presented.
   
3. Quota Control: Suppose you want only 1000 responses for a specific question, then you can set the limit of the number of responses with quota control. Once you reach the limit, no further responses will be accepted.
   
4. Dynamic text/comments: When you want respondents to give descriptive comments on the selection of particular answer option, you can configure question to have dynamic text/comments. The respondents will be displayed a text box only if they select an option that is configured.
   
5. Extraction: Many times it is required to drill down further to get more insights. Extraction programming can help to display question options out of options selected in the current question. This enables you to present the selected options of a multi-select question as answer options of the next question.
   
6. Show/Hide Questions: Sometimes it is required to hide a question based on an option selected. The only condition is that there must be a page break between these questions. For instance, respondents from different countries can be asked different questions. In this case, the survey administrator will create one list of questions but set conditions so that people are presented only relevant questions.
   
7. Show/Hide Options: You can program the survey to show or hide answer options in either a matrix, single-choice, or select-many questions based on predefined criteria. These criteria could be answers to previous questions or custom variables assigned beforehand.
   
8. Scoring: Surveys can be used to calculate scores in real-time. You can conduct online tests and compute scores. Further, it can be configured to display the total or section-wise score to the test taker immediately after the test. Or they can be sent scores in a separate email.
   
9. Javascript Logic: If in any case, the above logic mechanism doesn’t satisfy the business requirements, custom javascript logic can also be applied to the questions. You can insert logic through javascript code either before the page loads or after the respondent hits the submit button.