How to display multiple questions on the same screen – SurveyCTO Support Center

Some users ask whether it is possible to display more than one question on the same screen/a single screen in SurveyCTO. The answer is, yes! That is definitely possible.

To display multiple questions on the same screen, all you have to do is put those questions in a group and then use the "field-list" appearance option for that group. See this sample form that uses the field-list appearance to display multiple questions on the same screen here.

Some important caveats

1) If a question (let's call it q2) is relevant or skipped based on the answer to an earlier question (let's call it q1), then you should not put q1 and q2 on the same screen, since the relevance will not work in that case. Why?

By telling SurveyCTO to put questions together on a single screen, you are saying "display all these questions together at the same time". And so it would not make sense to both indicate that you want to display q1 and q2 together, at the same time, and also indicate that you want to only display q2 after an answer for q1 is entered and validated (and SurveyCTO validates responses each time the screen is swiped, so the answer to q1 will not be validated until the user swipes to go to the next screen).

2) While users often want to display questions on the same screen because that is what a lot of us are familiar with based on our experience with paper surveys or simple web surveys, we do not recommend putting multiple questions on the same screen.

We've done a lot of usability testing and haven't found there to be many merits to this kind of layout. If there are more questions arranged vertically on the screen than can fit on the screen together, all you are doing is replacing horizontal scrolling with vertical scrolling (which tends to be more confusing for surveyors than a simple swipe horizontally). Similarly, we've found that surveyors make more errors the more questions there are on the screen (since it prevents them from just focusing on one question at a time). The vertical scrolling and/or focusing on more than one question at the same time also slows them down.

Hence, overall, we've found that the fewer questions are grouped onto a single screen (A) the more accurate answers tend to be and (B) the faster surveyors can complete surveys. The clear winner for the optimal survey layout is to have a single question on the screen at a time.

There are certainly some legitimate uses for grouping questions on the same screen but we recommend that you use this feature sparingly.

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Some important caveats

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