Interview survey editor

2021

The new survey editor: question nodes with connections on a canvas

Problem. Building surveys for trade shows was inflexible and hard to understand. We needed a new editor version that marketers could actually use: surveys are built in the desktop version before the show and filled in inside the app at the show itself.

Research

Competitive analysis, in-depth interviews with managers, field studies. The takeaways:

Many companies don’t build surveys themselves and are happy to pay our managers to do it
Surveys are often deep and heavily branched
Requests to create surveys arrive right in the middle of a show
Most participants don’t understand how to link an answer to the next question
Some question types are missing: city picker, product picker, price range

Conclusions

Surveys will be built by a trained person (our support or the company’s marketer). We need: convenient branching, an intuitive way to link questions, more question types, minimal creation time and a foundation for future features.

How surveys work

How it works: a participant builds the survey in the web account or via support, and it ships to the app

The old editor

The old survey editor: a long list of questions with a settings sidebar

Downsides: users didn’t understand how answers connect to questions, and the editor didn’t scale — deep nesting was impossible.

Implementation

For the new version I chose nodes — a pattern from signal-processing tools and mind maps: they visualize relationships and reduce cognitive load. A branched survey is assembled on a canvas from connected nodes:

The node editor: an answer of one question linked to the next question

On the user’s device the survey unfolds into a regular step-by-step questionnaire:

The survey on a mobile device: single and multiple choice, an important-question marker

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