Typeform has started to roll out “Partial Submit” as a question type! This is potentially a great feature but needs a little work to be really useful in complex quizzes that use logic rules.
One of the big concerns for many folks in the Typeform Community is the ability to capture the email address of someone who starts their form but never submits. (There are several quiz/survey concerns about being entitled to ask for email address at the beginning of the form but that is a separate topic).
This partial submit feature could used to capture the email address early in your form – just case someone does not hit the final button.
Note the new option under Form Structure when you choose to add a question.
This will give you the option to capture the data from the current form – at the point in the form where you insert the Partial Submit Point – into the Typeform Results tab. This is in advance of the traditional Submit at the end of the form.
I’ll go over the limitations at the end of this note but let’s walk through it.
I created a simple lead form that would capture the user’s first name and country before the partial submit. After the partial submit I added in a Contact question to get the email and company name.
Let’s take a look at the data capture process in the form process.
I connected the typeform to a Google Sheet to see the interaction between the form, the typeform results tab and the Google Sheet data submission.
Here’s what the two data stores look like before the quiz has any responses.
When you insert the partial submit question in the flow, here’s what it looks like to the user – note the “Submit and continue” button.
What I see in Results tab:
Note the Partial indicator that is highlighted in yellow once the data is submitted.
Nothing in the google sheet yet:
Form completed and what shows in results?
Note the email is there in first column – this was a field added AFTER the partial submit and the response type is now ‘completed’
Google sheet now updated:
There is no option in the messages to change the Submit and Continue button to other text string - if I don’t want to have folks know they are submitting..
Different from using a redirect to another form in that you don’t see the ‘powered by typeform’ logo as the second or subsequent form loads up. It’s pretty slick from that perspective
Limitation - Only one partial submit per form.. have to put it in the “right place” in the context of your form. It would be lovely to have multiple points where you could have partial submits.
Limitation: if you add simple logic after the partial submit it isn’t going to allow the partial submit function to work. I added one small logic rule to take users who identified as being from Canada to another question and it ‘put the partial submit to sleep’:
And you can see in the image below that the Partial Submit show’s the crescent of the moon – my version of sleeping. Even if the logic is inserted after the partial submit, the feature is disabled.
And what you see on your Question is below
Limitation: you need to be on the Plus plan or higher.
I’ve been in touch with the folks at Typeform about some of the limitations I have cited above and I’ve been told that: -
- They are working on removing the restriction on logic rules – they will release a version that will permit logic rules to be used with partial submit in the near future.
- They are also working on the ‘follow-ups’ ability for partial submits – in the current implementation you cannot execute an automatic follow-up on the partial submit.
- Multiple partial submit points is in the ‘backlog’ of feature development and will be a while before it comes
Overall the feature will be valuable for those who have simple lead gen forms – today. As soon as the ability to have logic rules AND partial submit, the feature will provide a lot of benefit for users who create more complex forms.
You can read more about the feature in this Typeform Help Centre article at this link
Hope this provides a little insight into the feature
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