Let US jump back to a skipped question or a different question branch !!

Hi @LETMEJUMP Thanks for stopping by and sharing your feedback. Could you send a screenshot of your logic jumps and what you’re trying to do? We can try to take a peek at what’s happening and provide suggestions to get it working. 😀

Hi, I want to create a troubleshooting guide so that users just answer yes/no and go to different questions but they may end up back at a question that they had previously skipped. Typeform won’t allow me to add logic that they can go back to this skipped question. I’m wondering why not or is there a work around?

Did you ever get an answer to this? Is there any hope of being able to go back to a skipped question?

Hi @DebbieEcoBurner It’s not possible to set logic jumps backwards in the form. You can navigate backwards and forwards in the form, but your logic jumps need to be forward-moving. 

@DebbieEcoBurner - one option that i built out for a client who had a similar requirement was to take create a series of additional forms that the user would be redirected to if they wanted to answer a question they had skipped .. that might alter the flow of logic through the original response path: 

• for each question that could be skipped but end up pointing the individual towards, you redirect them to the form version that starts with that logic path ie if q4 is what was skipped but based on the flow through q6 it might drive them back to q4, then the user would be redirected to a typeform called “q4skip” and follow the logic flow from there.. 
  • if this form sends them to another skipped question, they are redirected there
• all the forms are connected to the same google sheet (each form hits a separate tab) and the results/submissions were pulled/summarized onto an additional tab i called ‘reporting’ using the email id to relate and lookup the records across the tabs. 

you could do the same by creating logic paths inside the same form but instead of sending them back to q4 you might be sending them ahead to q45… i had this scenario in a choose your own adventure typeform for last halloween.. 

des

Hi, for us this limitation is very critical! I need half of the user to respond to question A and then question B, while the other half to respond to question B and then to question A. In order to do this I should create 4 different forms according to @john.desborough suggestion, because I have other questions before and after question A and B. Like @LETMEJUMP said...WHY do you impose this limitation? As an informatic engineer I don’t get this point!

@Liz please discuss this with tech team

Hi @paolopa The reason we don’t allow for jumping backwards is because it may clear some of the answers already provided in the form. If you haven’t already adjusting the logic to move forward, I would definitely suggest doing so to prevent any logic issues. 

@Liz

I would like to echo, from a proverbial mountaintop, this call for a product change!

I’ve been a Typeform user since… well, nearly since the very beginning—and we used to have complete freedom over our logic paths, including the ability to loop backward. There are lots of legitimate use cases for that, and the users who need to meet them shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to build crazy workarounds to overcome this unnecessary and unwelcome blocker.

I agree with others that it’s perfectly reasonable, even wise, to display a warning (and maybe even force users to acknowledge it to proceed) when there is a loop/repeat, but it is not reasonable at all to completely block power users who know what they’re doing from building their forms to function the way they need to function! The decision to implement this blocker is clearly aimed primarily at protecting low-skilled users from themselves—which is important—but it does not need to be done at the expense of the rest of the user base!

My use case: realtime error handling!  Most of the Typeforms I build kick off internal business processes, automated by Zapier. Those automations can fail when the data is bad. For example, I may ask an employee for their email address in the Typeform, and use that email address in my automation to look up the user’s ID in other company platforms. You’d be surprised how many employees—even when clearly instructed to enter their work email address—let muscle memory take over and unintentionally type their personal email address. When the Zap tries to find that email address in other company platforms, it fails. Sure, there’s error handling I can do on the Zapier side, but I can’t feasibly change the actual data provided by the Typeform. My solution for this used to be setting up logic on the email address question that checks their input for one of the valid company email domains, and, if it isn’t found (because the employee put in their Gmail address, for instance) it reminds them in a statement that they need to use their work address, and sends them back to fix their mistake. This was perfect. And if the user really wasn’t paying any attention and still entered the wrong domain (or had a typo in the domain) on the next attempt, the process would repeat until they entered it correctly, and the correct one is the only one that would “stick” (because the email address was overwritten each time). This simple mechanism saved countless hours of troubleshooting and having to resubmit Typeforms on behalf of users.

And before someone reminds me that I can have multiple instances of the same question to direct users to, I can say with certainty that this is not an adequate solution: it requires extra labor to configure in the first place, it greatly increases the odds of logic errors and of breaking something when the Typeform needs to be updated in future, and most importantly, it prevents me from properly mapping the [email address] value into my automations. Yes, I can map each of the question variants’ values into an email field to try and get the correct one in there, but that will fail too because the incorrect attempts were not overwritten by the correct one. And that headache increases exponentially as I end up needing to duplicate more of the subsequent questions due to the ‘can’t go to a different branch’ problem.

I have my own business that offers process automation and SaaS platform consultation to other organizations, and I’m sorry to say that after many years of advocating for Typeform as the preferred intake mechanism, I don’t think I can do that anymore, and this limitation is the biggest reason why. Time to direct clients to Paperform instead, which has its own limitations but in general is much more flexible with logic than today’s version of Typeform. It makes me really sad. Please, please, for power users everywhere, consider providing a way around this limitation for users who need one. It could be an opt-in setting on a per-user or -organization basis. Easy.