I’ve built a commuting survey and it works relatively well, but I could do with some suggestions to improve the way respondents input their transport methods. I need to capture more than one mode of transport, as quite often people will use a number of methods to get to work within a journey or on different days within a week. I’ve used the matrix method fairly successfully but it has the following issues:
It relies on people understanding percentages
It doesn’t have the ability to check whether the answers add up to 100%
It requires every transport method to be scored
The list is very long (and may grow)
Can anyone think of a better way to do this? I’ve considered logic routes to break it down but before I attempt it I wanted to pick the brains of you all.
I’ve attached a screenshot for context.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
Cheers
Lewis
Best answer by john.desborough
@Liz - if only you could use the answers of the matrix questions in logic calculations and jumps.. some day!!
@LewisK - maybe consider something along this line:
start with a multiple select multiple choice that groups some of the items together to start with ie public transit, personal car/truck, air, self-propelled (based on your categories above)
then ask question(s) based on what they chose that says “you chose x - what percentage of the time do you use this overall method? “
for the next method they chose you can use variables and recall to show something like this in the description:
ok you said you take public transit 25 percent of the time. How much do you drive your personal vehicle?
use calculations to determine if 100-25 from previous - y from this one is greater than or = 0 .. if so you can move forward and if less than 0 tell them to adjust the value and go back to the percent question
then do the next method they chose..
you use the calculations to determine if they have used up the 100 percent yet. if over, then tell them to adjust the current, if they are less then cycle them through the scenarios again
yes i know this is a pain but it would work
then you can do a question group approach for each one along these lines
ok, you said you take public transit. which of the following types of public transit do you take?
multiple multiple choice
evaluate the same way as before to 100 percent (of this category - we will worry about the overall later)
repeat for each type of transport/question group
once you have done this for all the selected groups, you will have the ability to multiply the ‘big group’ percentages by the individual activities to get the breakdown by multiplying the two percentages together ie public transportation = 25 and bus = 60 (percent of time in public transport) = 15% of the overall
you could add a top level category called Other and allow folks to add in values if you want and then follow the same decomposition approach. this would also give you a list of other types that you could add in later in another iteration of the quiz.
Trust me it is not as elegant as a matrix (with ‘add to 100) would be nor as simple. But if you want to do it all in native typeform right away this would be one way to work around the current lack of logic on matrix operations.
Hi @LewisK Thank you for the screenshot and explanation! This is very helpful.
You would most likely need to use logic jumps if you want the form to automatically calculate items for you, but @john.desborough or @Paulo might already have an example or insight on how to set this up!
@Liz - if only you could use the answers of the matrix questions in logic calculations and jumps.. some day!!
@LewisK - maybe consider something along this line:
start with a multiple select multiple choice that groups some of the items together to start with ie public transit, personal car/truck, air, self-propelled (based on your categories above)
then ask question(s) based on what they chose that says “you chose x - what percentage of the time do you use this overall method? “
for the next method they chose you can use variables and recall to show something like this in the description:
ok you said you take public transit 25 percent of the time. How much do you drive your personal vehicle?
use calculations to determine if 100-25 from previous - y from this one is greater than or = 0 .. if so you can move forward and if less than 0 tell them to adjust the value and go back to the percent question
then do the next method they chose..
you use the calculations to determine if they have used up the 100 percent yet. if over, then tell them to adjust the current, if they are less then cycle them through the scenarios again
yes i know this is a pain but it would work
then you can do a question group approach for each one along these lines
ok, you said you take public transit. which of the following types of public transit do you take?
multiple multiple choice
evaluate the same way as before to 100 percent (of this category - we will worry about the overall later)
repeat for each type of transport/question group
once you have done this for all the selected groups, you will have the ability to multiply the ‘big group’ percentages by the individual activities to get the breakdown by multiplying the two percentages together ie public transportation = 25 and bus = 60 (percent of time in public transport) = 15% of the overall
you could add a top level category called Other and allow folks to add in values if you want and then follow the same decomposition approach. this would also give you a list of other types that you could add in later in another iteration of the quiz.
Trust me it is not as elegant as a matrix (with ‘add to 100) would be nor as simple. But if you want to do it all in native typeform right away this would be one way to work around the current lack of logic on matrix operations.
Thanks as always @john.desborough I will work through your suggestions and let you know how I get on. I’ve got a google sheets doc that does some error checking on the percentages, so maybe I can build it into the flow.
Me again, not finished woking through the suggestions yet, but wondered if the matrix question can be prepopulated with a value. So for my situation above, can it be set to 0% as default? I appreciate all matrix configs are custom, but can a default selection be set, like a radio button preselected to ‘yes’.
Still battling with this one. I’ve kept it as I originally posted for now, but wondered is it possible using the developer code to preselect the matrix, so that all values start off with a default of 0%?
