When you are creating your questionnaire in the portal, you might want your respondents to rank predefined answer options. In this article we will provide with a tutorial on how to add ranking questions in your questionnaire.


Table of contents:


General

Say, for instance you want your respondents to give a top-3 of their favourite fruits from a predefined list.


Rank the following fruits in order of preference. Which is your favourite fruit?


Bananas
Apples
Strawberries
Grapes
Oranges


For more information about the basic functionality of the Questionnaire, read the article: Quick overview and basic functionality


Adding questions to your questionnaire

Open or create a questionnaire by clicking the Data Collection button in the left-hand menu of your portal and select one of the three available categories.



  • Add a page to your questionnaire by clicking the Add page (1) button in the Questionnaire Engine.
  • A pop-up window will appear.



  • Give your page a name (2).
  • Click the Question icon (3) to select the page type and after that click the Add button (4).
  • A new pop-up window will appear where you need to select the question type. Select Single response.


A new page will always be placed at the end of all other pages in the page slider, before End page, Completed page and Time elapsed page.



  • Create your question in the questionnaire builder and click the Update button (5).
  • Hover over the question in the page slider. When you do this, you have several options available to you. Click the Copy button (6).
  • In my example I named the first question Favourite Fruits One, the copy I named Favourite Fruits Two.
  • Click the Update button (5) again to save the questionnaire.
  • Create another copy of the question and save the questionnaire. You now have the same question three times.
  • Open the first copy of the question and change your question text slightly. For example, if the first question was ‘Rank the following fruits in order of preference. Which is your favourite fruit?’ change it to:

    Rank the following fruits in order of preference. Which is your second favourite fruit?

  • Do the same with the second copy of the question.
  • To help the respondent to answer the questions as quickly as possible, activate the AUTO-PROCEED option in the PAGE SETTINGS pane for these questions (7).


Using the Dynamic Rule Engine to hide answer options

When you have added all the ranking questions to your questions, you need to add some rules which automatically hides answers already given on the next question page. If a respondent selects his favourite fruit as being Bananas, we want the next question to not have the option Bananas available for the respondent to choose from.

  • Select the FIRST ranking question.



  • Hover over the question in the page slider and click the Dynamic Rule Engine button (8).
  • A pop-up window will appear.
  • Click the Add rule (wizard) in top right corner of the pop-up window.


The rule wizard works in such a way that it guides you in creating conditions for specific actions. Based on the choices you make new options get loaded, which makes creating rules very easy.



  • Start off by giving your rule an easily identifiable name (9). Because we are adding a Skip Option rule it’s best to also add that information to the name of your rule. In our example the rule is named SkipOptionBananas.
  • In the Conditions section of the wizard, make sure the option Any Condition is selected (10).
  • When you click the plus icon two options appear. Click the first icon to select the Questionnaire option (11).
  • Select the first ranking question in the List of pages dropdown list (12).
  • Select the question text in the Sub question / Input fields dropdown list (13).
  • Select IS in the Condition dropdown list (14).
  • Click the ‘constant’ icon (15).
  • Select the Answer option.
  • In the Action section of the wizard, click the plus icon and select Skip option from the dropdown list (16).
  • Select the next page from Select pages dropdown list (17). This is the page where you want to hide the answer option.
  • Select the question from the Select question dropdown list (18).
  • Select the option you want to hide from the Select options dropdown list (19) 
  • Click the Save button (20).
  • Click the Rules tab (21) to open an overview of all rules added to this page.



  • Repeat steps 9 to 21 for the next Skip Option rule.
  • Do this for all the answer options on the first ranking question.
  • When you have created all the Skip Option rules for the first ranking question, you can close the pop-up window by clicking the Close button in the top right corner (22). 



  • Click the Update button (5) to save your questionnaire.

 

  • Open the SECOND ranking question.
  • Repeat steps 8 to 21 to create the ‘same’ Skip Option rules. This time however, you need to add two conditions to your rule (23):
    The first condition checks the answer given in the first ranking question
    The second condition checks the answer given in the second ranking question.
    If your respondent has selected Bananas as his favourite fruit or as his second favourite fruit, we want to hide Bananas as an option on the third ranking question.



Grouping the ranking questions

We are now going to group all the ranking questions into one group. By grouping them, you can easily move them around in your questionnaire without losing their order.


For more information about grouping, read the article: Grouping page


  • Click Add page in the Questionnaire Engine.
  • Give the page a name.
  • Click the Group icon (24) to select the page type.
  • Click the Add button.



  • In the Editor View you see two options; Add page and Add existing page. Because we already created the questions for our group, click Add existing page.



  • A pop-up window will appear where you can select the questionnaire pages you want to add to your group. Select the pages and click the Add button.


Showing the answers given

If you want to show your respondents the answers they have given before continuing to the next question you can add an information page to your questionnaire to do just that.



  • Click the Add page button.
  • Give the page a title.
  • Select the Group icon to select the page type.
  • Make sure that the Information page you just created is located after the ranking questions.
  • Create the text on the page and place the cursor where you want to show the previous given answer.



  • Hover over the question in the page slider and click the Field Picker button (25).
  • A pop-up window will appear.
  • Click Questionnaire on the left-hand side of the pop-up window.
  • You get an overview of all the questionnaire pages available to you.
  • Select the questionPage.
  • Click the question to insert.
  • Repeat this for all three questions.


For more information about the Field Picker tool, read the article: Personalized texts in your questionnaire


Test & Publish the questionnaire

Before publishing your questionnaire it’s wise to test it first. Going through your questionnaire and using the example above, the screens will look like this: