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Form questions are a great way to collect various kinds of information from respondents in a single question, using validation to ensure that responses are in the format you need them.

 

1. Building a Form Question

  1. In the Survey Editor, click the Form question Icon in the question menu, or drag the icon into place.
  2. Type or paste your question into the Question field.
  3. Type up to 10 items into the Label field, and click the + icon to add additional options. Use copy/paste to automatically populate answer options.
  4. Click the Any Entry field next to a respective Label to select a validation from our library.
    Ex: Ensure respondents enter a date in a specific format by selecting US date (e.g.: 01/31/25) from the validation library.
  5. Hover over the answer number and click the X to delete an answer.
  6. Click the Required field to the right of an entity to toggle the response to Optional.
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2. Using Validation

As you begin adding fields, blue validation rules will appear on the right side. Validation rules limit what respondents can or must enter in order to advance to the next question. If you leave it blank, any entry will be accepted. 

There are three placeholder symbols that we use in the validation rules. The pound or hashtag symbol stands for a digit, star stands for a letter, and underscore stands for any character. For example, you can limit the response to 3 digits by adding 3 hash signs in the field on the right. You may also add extra validation conditions in conjunction with underscore.

You can define letter or number ranges by separating the symbols with a hyphen and placing them in braces. 

  • _{1-100} indicates that the placeholder will accept any number from 1 to 100. 

If the letters or numbers you want to accept are not sequential, list them separated by commas and with no spaces in braces. 

  • _{A,D,H} only accepts the letters A, D, or H as an entry.

With some additional rules and brackets, you can accommodate an even larger number of characters. Below are some additional examples:

  • _[10] expects exactly 10 symbols.
  • _[10-15] allows no fewer than 10 and no more than 15 symbols. 
  • _[10+] allows 10 or more symbols.

Also, you can combine braces and brackets in the same validation rule.

  • _{A-F}[3] forces respondents to enter exactly 3 letters, where each letter can be A, B, C, D, E, or F. 

Some special fields, like emails and dates, are described with special codes. There are many modifications that you can use from our library. 

If you type something in the right column that our platform doesn't recognize as a validation rule, it will prefill the field with that phrase. This is useful when you want to prefill a currency or frequency and ask respondents to fill out the amount. 

If text remains black, it will not be highlighted in the validation rule field, and indicates that it will be shown as read-only text to respondents.
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IMPORTANT REMINDER

It is against our Terms of Use to ask respondents from our panel any personally identifiable information, such as their name, email, phone number, and so on. For this reason, you’ll see fewer pre-written options in the fields library on a Panel Survey. 

 
 

3. Analyzing Form Questions

On the Result page, form questions display a bar chart summarizing how many responses were collected for each field.

  1. Click the Open Ended icon within the summary stats of the question to view the raw responses, or click the Open Ended Response Icon at the top of the results report, and use the question menu to filter answers.
  2. Click the individual Answer headers labeled after the Form fields to see a word cloud of entries for that field.
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Take a test drive on real-world results for this question type! Explore a live demo report.