Forms don’t need to suck

How better logic flows can help

Everyone knows how painful it is to fill in a form or survey that makes you repeat your answers, enter information for pointless questions, or have you endlessly click through irrelevant sections. The problem isn’t you — form logic is so difficult to implement that most survey creators don’t even bother.

But, if you’re building a form and don’t use proper logic you risk losing the majority of your respondents to sheer boredom. As the questions get irrelevant, or the flow seems to continue forever, people start to close the tab — leaving you without any answers at all.

Logic flows are the bits that wire up a form to make it intelligent, helping make the experience smoother for people answering it, and skipping over the irrelevant questions to save them time.

A practical example of this is a survey that asks different questions if you choose ‘coffee’ as your favorite drink, hiding those that would appear if you prefer ‘tea.’ If you choose coffee, the survey asks you how you prepare your beans, what kind of grinder you own and so on, but doesn’t show any further tea-related questions.

Logic is difficult

Today’s tools make using meaningful logic flows really difficult to do in lots of ways. SurveyMonkey, Typeform and others make you define your logic in a complicated list view, without an easy way to see it from a high level — in most cases there’s no easily readable overview or…