In CAWI mode, it’s important that respondants follow the order of the questionnaire as defined section by section, question by question, in order to let skip conditions and validation controls operate correctly.
Giving the possibility to hide the sidebar is an efficient solution to avoid that respondants click anyway.
Is there a tip to achieve this? By addind CSS rule for example or by JS or by adding a configuration option?
This can be featured as an option in the designer.
The same question is about the progress bar. Sometimes, it may be interesting to hide it, especially for long questionnaires in order to avoid that respondants leave the application when they see that the progression is so slow. We can optionnaly notify them at the beginning by a text showing how time (average) is needed to reply and so don’t let the percentage progression always under their eyes!
In CAWI mode, it is important that the skip conditions and validation controls operate correctly even when the respondents don’t follow the order of the questionnaire as defined section by section, question by question.
That said, the implications of this is that:
if there is something that absolutely must be answered before something else is answered - make that is an enabling condition (for that second thing). Use the IsAnswered() function suggested above to enforce this explicitly.
If there is something that is part of your validation and hasn’t been answered yet, don’t show an error.
Chaining enabling conditions on the previous question works ‘academically-speaking’, but in real world surveys is not something that can be recommended. First, you as Designer will be lost in the complexities of determining what question is actually ‘previous’ for every other question and every possible input situation. Second, it will create a deadlock if the respondent genuinely can’t or doesn’t want to answer that specific question.
It also takes away the possibility to navigate back and revise their answers. Hardly a desirable consequence.
Enabling conditions is the tool to implement restrictions on where in the questionnaire the respondent may jump at any time depending on the answers.
Designers of the questionnaire in Survey Solutions describe the logic and content of the questionnaire, but don’t have direct control over the presentation. If you manage to do otherwise, please demonstrate, as this may be a security flaw (especially inclusion of a user-written JS code).
The answer is also the same. There is no way a questionnaire designer or a survey coordinator can prevent the progress bar from appearing.
Writing this for each question in a long questionnaire with lot of sections/variables (some hundreds) is tedious and time consuming. And also as said, determining a previous question taking into account skip logic with combinatory possibilities is very complex.
For CAWI mode (so without the presence/assistance of interviewer), responding to a public survey, I think that proposing in the SuSo system options show/hide sidebar/progressbar is a feature that may solve in the better way.
Giving the possibility to allow or no navigating back is an option to consider also.
By all this, a designer will be responsible on the navigation behavior, taking into account all the consequences.
Sure that security questions are important. But giving some flexibility in the design will provide extended possibilities of SuSo.
I do so in some open source tools and I hope this possible here but your choice is not to make it open.
For the moment, I’m just experiencing possibilities of your soft. We will see if it’s appropriate for our needs.