Editor step 2: Questions
If you used one of our templates, you will find that there are already questions added to your survey. These questions can be altered or deleted, and you can of course add new questions.
The questions are also structured under blocks. These generally serve no purpose in the published version of the survey, they are only used to help you to structure your survey. This is mainly needed for general surveys, as they tend to be longer.
For a survey with a simple structure, the blocks can be used to categorize the questions, to make it easier to find the question you are looking for and getting a general overview. For a more complex survey, the blocks can be used for creating rules for when to show which question. If you want to read more about blocks, page breaks and text for structuring your survey, we have an article about that.
There is some information you can get about the questions in your survey from this view. You can see what type of question they are from the icons used (you can read more about question types here)…
…and if the question requires an answer to be able to submit the responses (however, Extellio collects all answers, regardless of whether the respondents answered all questions or left halfway through). If the question is followed by an asterisk, it’s a required question.
You can also see if the question is a follow-up to a previous question, which is explained more further down.
Lastly, you can see if the question is a KPI question and which category they belong to. Questions with this information are questions for which you can get an industry benchmark (at least if the industry have enough surveys), otherwise you can use our “Global” industry. You can find more information about our industries here. Industry benchmarks are currently only relevant to general surveys.
Add questions
Now that you understand this view better, it’s time to create a new question. To do that, you select the question type from the menu on the left, and then click and drag that question type to the survey. In this example, a single choice question.
When you add a new question to your survey, the edit modal automatically opens. Here you write the question (for example “What are you mainly looking for on our website today?”) and a description of question if needed. This is usually not necessary, but is an option if you feel the question needs more explaining but don’t want a longer question. For example, we use it for rating questions, to explain what is meant by “navigation” and so on. The description will appear between the question and the answer, in a lighter color, see example below.
The eye icon to the right of the question determines its visibility. Here you can activate and deactivate questions from a survey without having to remove them (you are also not able to remove questions that have collected data, but you are able to create new versions of the survey without these questions. Read more about survey versions here.
For single and multiple choice questions, you also need to add options. In the box “Add a new option”, write the option you want and press Enter. You can change the order of the options after you have added them, by clicking on the three lines and then dragging the option to its new location.
You don’t need to worry too much about the order, but if you have the option “Other” or “Don’t know” etc, it should always be placed last.
Next, decide of you want the question to be required. Questions that shouldn't be required are text answers and personal questions. Text answers are more time consuming, and personal questions can feel intrusive. Both are reasons to leave the survey. By not making those questions required, the likelihood of the respondents staying is higher.
There is also the choice to shuffle the order, which means that the order of the options will be random every time the survey is answered. This should never be used for options in a scale, such as 1-5 or good-bad. If you have options such as “Other” or “Don’t know”, you can choose to not shuffle the last option, which means that “Other” or “Don’t know” will always be last in the list.
If you have chosen a single choice question, as we did in this example, but found that you’d rather have a multiple choice question, you have the option to change the question type here. You can also change to a rating question, which means that you are able to add values to the option, which can then be calculated to rating scores etc.
For rating questions (a version of a single choice question), the value and the option does not have to be the same. Instead, you can have text options, which are translated into numbers (their values) for the calculation of the score.
You also select under which result heading to add the question (this will make more sense when we go through the survey results). Basically, you select categories for the results. That way, all the role questions will be under the same heading, and so on.
For the benchmarks, you are not able to add these to questions yourself. That is to make sure customers don’t accidentally add the wrong question to a benchmark and affect the results. If you create a new question and want it to be added to a benchmark, send an email to customersuccess@extellio.com and we will help you.
The last question setting is display rules. This setting is used for follow-up, or dependent, questions. If a question doesn’t have display rules, it is shown to all respondents. If it has display rules, the question is only asked to the respondents that fulfil the requirements. For example, if you have the option “Other” to a question, you may want to know what “Other” entails. You can then add a follow-up question for the respondents who answered “Other”, and only they will be asked this question.
If you have several questions that you only want to ask a certain role or visitors with a certain purpose, etc, you are also able to add display rules to a block, which you can read more about here.
When all the settings are in place, click on save and the question is added to your survey.
If you want to move the question to a different place in the order, click on the three lines and drag the question to its new place.
You also have the option to delete questions and other elements, such as blocks and page breaks etc, from the survey. However, you are only able to delete a question that has no data connected to it (if you still want to remove the question, you can hide it instead – see above).
Also, when you delete a block, you will delete all the questions that are connected to that block too. If you only want to remove the block, first disconnect the questions (click on the three lines and drag the question to the left) and then delete the block.
For feedback surveys, you may also like to add a short introduction. Do so by adding “Text” at the top of the survey.
If you want to preview your survey at this stage, you can do so with the preview button.
To change the survey's name or industry, click on the "Settings" button.
Once you are done with the content, it’s time for the next step, the survey ending.
