Conditional branching

Conditional branching allows users to skip screens in the survey if certain user-defined conditions are met. This is a great way to avoid survey fatigue and make sure the respondents will see the questions that matter to them, minimizing their time and effort and maximizing your data. 

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Conditional branching has quite some aliases such as question logic, branch logic, branching, survey routing or disqualify logic. Luckily, they all do the same thing, which is creating a custom path through the survey based on a respondent’s answers. This path will vary for each respondent based on rules that the surveyor predefined. This will increase the efficiency of the respondents as they will not have to go through non-relevant questions.

This guide will teach you:

1. Conditional branching illustration
2. Benefits of using conditional branching
3. Ideas of how you can use conditional branching

1. Conditional branching illustration

In the example shown here, the respondents who answer 'No' to the initial question will not need to bother reading questions regarding specific details about their work-out which are not relevant to them.

2. Benefits of using conditional branching

• Using question logic to hide irrelevant questions makes it quicker for the respondent to answer the survey, and everyone loves something that is short, sweet, and to the point!
• Less chance of drop-outs - people tend to get frustrated when they have to read through questions that are not relevant to them. By hiding those questions and showing only relevant questions, respondents can proceed through the survey, answering each question without feeling like they are wasting time.
• The gathered data that you will ultimately need to analyze will be relevant, saving you time wading through loads of N/A responses or wondering why certain questions were left blank.

3. Ideas of how you can use conditional branching

There are endless possibilities of how you can improve your survey by using question logic. We'll just give you some inspiration to start you off! Firstly, don't forget that Pointerpro's question logic feature does not just give you the option to skip to a specific question based on criteria, but you can also specify that respondents should be skipped to the end of the survey, show or hide specific answers or require questions to be answered (features available depending on the plan).

Here are a few ideas of how to implement question logic:

• If you have gender-specific questions, show only the relevant questions based on the respondent's answer to their gender at the beginning of the survey.
• If you ask customers for a product rating, get more detailed feedback from those you most want to hear from (the highest and lowest ratings) by showing an open question asking those customers to explain their answer.
• You can create one survey which is relevant to different departments of your office. Use the first question to find out which department the employee is part of, and then set the logic to display only the questions relevant to that department.
• Set respondents to be skipped to the end of the survey if their answers do not match your criteria.

What's next?

• Outcomes is a feature that allows you to select what you will show to your respondents as a final screen, based on their answers to all questions or show a screen based on criteria that you have specified, such as a specific quiz score. 
• Use Question grouping & Question blocks: You might want to show more than one question on the screen to make your questionnaire seem shorter. Question grouping is just what you need! You can also activate or de-activate all questions in the question block with one click of a button.
• Save per question feature makes sure the answers to the questionnaire are saved in case a respondent closes his or her browser and you can turn on the Save and continue feature to let your respondents come back to the survey. There are two options: Save per question or Save and continue.