Picking a question type looks like a formatting decision. It is really a decision about what you will be able to do with the answers, made before you have any. A free-text box is easy to write and expensive to read. A dropdown is quick to answer and impossible to summarise if the options are wrong.
Questionful offers nineteen types. Here is the short version of when each family earns its place. The full list is on the question types page.
Text: short answer and paragraph
A short answer is for a fact you cannot offer as a choice: a name, an order number, a job title. A paragraph is for the one question where you actually want prose.
The cost is on your side. Twenty free-text answers are a pleasant read. Two hundred are a project. Use a paragraph question where the sentence is the point, and a choice question everywhere you already know the likely answers.
Choice: multiple choice, checkboxes, dropdown
These three are the workhorses, and they are also the only types that can branch. A form that needs to route people to different follow-ups has to ask the routing question as a choice.
- Multiple choice for one answer from a short list, all options visible.
- Checkboxes for any number of answers. Remember that “select all that apply” quietly changes what your percentages mean: they no longer add to 100.
- Dropdown for one answer from a long list, where showing every option would swamp the page. Countries, departments, dates in a fixed set.
If you find yourself writing more than about seven visible options, that is usually a dropdown. If you are writing more than about twenty, ask whether the question wants a short answer instead.
Scales: linear scale and range slider
Scales aggregate. Five hundred answers become an average and a distribution without anybody reading them, which is the whole reason to use one.
Two warnings. First, keep the same scale across the life of a survey: rewording it or changing its length makes this quarter incomparable with last. Second, scales cannot branch, so if the follow-up depends on the score, ask a small choice question beside the scale and branch on that.
A 0 to 10 recommendation question is a special case: Questionful reports its NPS automatically, with the promoter, passive and detractor split.
Grids: multiple choice grid and tick box grid
A grid asks the same scale or the same options about several things at once: rate these five sessions, tick which of these apply to each product. It is compact on a laptop and hard work on a phone, where a wide grid has to be read sideways.
Use one when the rows really do share a scale. When they do not, you have saved yourself space and cost the respondent accuracy.
Dates and times
Use the typed question rather than a text box. A date question produces dates; a short answer asking for a date produces “next Tuesday”, “12/03” and “asap”, in the same column.
There is no separate number or email question. A short answer carries validation instead: it can be required to be a number, a whole number, an email address or a URL, which does the same job in one place.
Uploads
A file upload question is right when the artefact is the answer: a CV, a photograph of the damage, a signed form. It is wrong as a convenience, because it moves work to the respondent and storage to you. In Questionful, uploads are a paid-plan feature and files are capped at 25 MB each, so a form that expects them needs a plan that allows them.
The advanced set
Eight more sit under Advanced in the picker: code editor, image hotspot, budget allocator, audio recorder, sketch pad, priority matrix, colour picker and range slider. Each exists for a narrow job, and the narrowness is the point: reach for one when it is exactly the answer you need, not to make a form look interesting.
The elements that are not questions
Titles and descriptions, images, videos and section breaks are laid out alongside questions but are not asked, and do not count towards the form’s question count. They earn their place when a form needs context: a picture of the thing being rated, a sentence explaining why you want a date of birth, a section break that says “three questions left”.
The rule underneath all of it
Choose the type that makes the answer smallest for the respondent and largest for you. Free text is the easiest to write and the hardest to use. Choice questions take five minutes longer to design and save you the analysis. Scales give you a number that only means something if you never touch the wording again.
Decide what the finished summary should look like before you pick the types. The form is the shape of that answer, run backwards.