How using Skip Logic can improve your survey design

Need help with survey design? With the right tools—and knowing how to use them—it’s easy to make a respondent-friendly survey that gets you valuable data.

Skip Logic is a handy tool when it comes to survey design, but we know it can also look intimidating.

It’s not as hard as it seems. Don’t know where to start? Here’s the breakdown of three simple types of Skip Logic that can transform your survey and improve your data.

Remember, these features are only available on our paid plan. If you still need more advice on how to make the most of your survey, our paid plan offers full access to phone support.

Advanced Branching is a core technique of survey design. It allows you to skip respondents to different pages of your survey depending on their answers.

Say you have a few different groups of respondents, but you want to show different survey pages to each group.

For example, you could be asking restaurant customers whether they’re regulars, if they come in once in awhile, or if it’s their first time at your restaurant. If you want to have different survey questions for each group, Advanced Branching is for you.

Advanced Branching saves responses, and then shows or hides the different pages of your survey depending on those answers. If a respondent says they’re a restaurant regular and another says they’re not, each of them will be sent to different pages.

Now you’ll be able to choose how you want your survey to act when it’s being taken. To start using the feature, you can create a plan for where certain respondents should be directed. Your plan can depend on your respondents’ answers, custom data from contacts, or custom variables.

Now you can show or hide specific questions or pages and allow respondents to skip to future points in your survey.

While Advanced Branching can change your entire survey, Advanced Piping gets a little bit more specific. It lets you personalize individual questions.

The feature allows you to insert text (like a respondent’s answer to a previous question, custom variables, or custom data from contacts) into survey questions.

Imagine you have an open-ended question at the start of your survey asking respondents to specify their favorite superhero. If a respondent replies “Iron Man,” you can pipe this information into future questions of your survey to personalize it.

Then, instead of using overly general or ambiguous question wording like, “what do you think of the superpowers of the hero previously selected?”, they’ll see “what do you think of Iron Man’s superpowers?”

You can also pipe information from contacts. For example, if you save someone’s name and email address to your contacts, you can pipe the information into your survey. When he opens it, he’ll see: “Hi ____, how is your day going?”

You basically get to personalize your survey questions for each respondent—depending on who they are and how they answer certain questions.

Want to make sure your respondents are paying attention when they’re taking your survey? Carry Forward helps you ask more specific follow-up questions that are relevant to your respondents’ previous answers.

Now you can custom tailor your survey questions by only keeping answer choices that relate to your respondents’ past answers.

Let’s say you ask respondents which national parks they’re familiar with (using a multiple choice question that allows multiple answers). Once they’ve answered, you can use Carry Forward to ask them more specific questions about only the parks they selected.

If you’re a soft-drink manufacturer conducting a market research survey, you can use Carry Forward to filter out what drinks respondents aren’t familiar with. Then, you can start asking what they think of the drinks they already selected.

Not only do you get more specific data, but you’re able to sort out uninterested and distracted respondents who won’t be able to provide accurate answers. With Carry Forward, you don’t have to remain on the surface level of your survey data anymore.

In whatever way you choose to design your survey, keep in mind that not only helps your respondents—but it also helps your data. Asking more specifics questions means you now have more specific answers. You’ll be able to dive deeper into your data to discover even more hidden stories.

Use these three Skip Logic features to make your respondent’s survey-taking experience more enjoyable, and your data more accurate.