Help/Logic & piping

Show, hide and skip — conditional logic

Logic keeps a survey short for each individual respondent without making it shallow. Someone who has never used the product does not get five questions about using it.

A show rule on Q4, driven by the answer to Q3.

Adding a rule

  1. 1
    Open the Logic panel on the question you want to control

    Rules live on the question being shown or hidden, not on the question being tested.

  2. 2
    Pick the earlier question to test

    Only questions that come before this one are available — a rule cannot depend on an answer that has not been given yet.

  3. 3
    Choose an operator and a value

    Equals, does not equal, contains, greater than, or less than.

  4. 4
    Choose what happens — show, hide, or skip to another question

The operators

OperatorMatches when
EqualsThe answer is exactly this value. Smart quotes and stray spaces are handled for you.
Does not equalThe answer is anything other than this value.
ContainsThe value appears somewhere in the answer. Useful across a family of options.
Greater than / Less thanNumeric comparison, for scales, sliders and NPS.
Watch out
Multiple rules combine with AND, never OR

Every rule on a question must pass for it to show. There is no “any of these” option.

To express “anyone except the most tenured group”, use a single does-not-equal rule rather than trying to list the groups you do want. Two equals rules on the same question can never both be true, so the question would never appear.

Testing a specific row of a grid

When the question you are testing is a Matrix, you also pick which row to look at — for example, show a follow-up when the row “My pay reflects my work” equals “Strongly disagree”. A grid rule without a row selected is treated as unfinished and quietly ignored, so always set both.

If you want a follow-up per disagreed row rather than one follow-up for a specific row, that is a loop rather than a rule.

Note
Skipped questions leave no trace in your data

If a respondent answers a question and a later change to their answers hides it, the stored answer is discarded rather than kept. This keeps your export honest: you never see an answer to a question the respondent was branched past.

When a question will not appear

Almost always one of these four:

  • The rule is incompleteNo source question, no value, no skip target, or a grid source with no row picked. Incomplete rules are ignored.
  • The source comes laterA rule can only read a question above it. Move the question, or move the rule.
  • Two rules contradictRemember they AND together.
  • It is a loop or carry-forward with an empty sourceThose hide themselves when there is nothing to render.
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