Last week I introduced a few tips and tricks on getting your questionnaires looking slick. 

Today’s post brings you the final part of my musings:

Calculate as much as possible
No-one wants to spend lengthy amounts of time filling in a questionnaire, so make it as easy as possible for your users by calculating as much as you can such as dates and price totals. Add lookup tables to pull in even more information such as currency, office address, principal signatory, contact details etc.

Use Always Show on pages
Add a page with guidance at the beginning of the questionnaire that introduces your users to the questionnaire, navigation instructions or gives them a feedback link address. Alternatively (or in addition) add a page to the end to tell them what to do next – how to retrieve the document, where and how to store it and what to do with answers files if you are using them. Use the Guidance area of the page to add your text and the Always Show option on the page to ensure that the page is always shown even if there are no relevant variables on that page.

Use Formatting
Formatting values in the generated document is pretty much a must but you can also format values in the questionnaire. Any unit can be added to a whole number or decimal number (eg Percent values can show the % sign after the input box, a term question could have “months” or “days” added after the input box). To do this define the default format and then use the “By Format” option on the presentation dropdown. If you do not want this format to appear in the generated document, you will need to use local formatting in the field to override this.

Use Defaults
Although you have to be a little careful with defaults as they are not actual values unless the user clicks Next on the page they show on, they can still help the user fill in less information by accepting the default. They can also include the values of other variables, so for example if the Contact information for the signatory is more often than not the same as the Buyer Address, then add the corresponding buyer variable name (in field brackets) to the default section of the signatory questions.

That’s it for this series. I hope you have found this a useful addition to your automation armoury. As I said in the last post, best practice would suggest creating simple, minimal questionnaires will give the best results on ROI but by adding a few of these features you can give a questionnaire a polished look without tipping the balance too much.

In this 2 part series, I thought I  would share with you a few tips on making your questionnaires appealing to your users. Generally our advice is to be as simple as possible in adding markup to templates thereby maximising the ROI on your time. However here are a few nice to haves that if implemented sparingly can make your questionnaires more user friendly:

Think about how questions are laid out
Its goes without saying that is it beneficial to think about who your users are, how would they like a question to be worded etc especially if they are not legally trained or are trainees etc. There are some instances where question layout can really help a questionnaire to zing. For example, you may put the main question as part of the group header – Enter Seller’s Address, then each question within that group that would just ask for First Line, Second Line, City, State and Zip rather than full questions each time. This can also work well for repeated groups of questions. 

Use Active Text
Active text allows text on the questionnaire to be updated from previous answers. This is done by adding the variable name or calculation you wish to refer to (don’t forget the field brackets). Active text can be used in the guidance, question prompts, default, Page/Group titles and even the name of the generated document. You may for example ask for the Buyer’s name and then instead of asking for the Buyer’s address, ask for the name of that company’s address (eg “Enter ABC Corp’s registered address”). Your page titles can then be changed from “Buyer Details” and “Seller Details” to “ABC Corp’s details” and “XYZ Ltd’s details”. Finally why not customise the name of your generated documents – instead of “License Agreement” it might be easier to file if the name on generation became ”License Agreement for ABC Corp”. This last example is achieved by adding the BuyerName to the Name section of the Template Properties. For more on Active Text see our video tutorial

Use Guidance
Guidance can be applied to Pages, groups and question variables. It is added to help clarify a question, explain what a group of questions are going to help ascertain etc. It can include links to other internal or external sites and some types of formatting (remember to use HTML in guidance formatting). By using active text and pulling the text from a lookup table, It can even by dynamic – changing depending on answers to previous questions or adapting to further clarify the options the user chooses on the current question.