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Simple Layout

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About the Simple Layout

When designing the look and feel of your survey, Qualtrics gives you several layouts to choose from. The Simple layout is designed to simplify your tools while making the resulting survey more mobile-friendly, easy to use, and accessible for your respondents.

Here are some of the benefits of the Simple layout:

  • Overall usability: Modernizing the user interface of a survey to meet evolving web design standards, powered by an updated web framework.
  • Mobile-friendly: Optimized for survey taking on mobile, meeting respondents where they are and setting the foundation for the interaction models of the future.
  • Accessibility: This layout meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards for key features, the full list of which can be found in Overview of Improvements.
  • Additional question types: This layout offers access to question types not available with other layouts, such as the Solicit Reviews Question.
Qtip: For the best results, we recommend applying this layout to a survey before you build it. It is okay to apply this layout to existing surveys, but keep in mind that not all features are compatible with this layout yet. Some features, such as custom Javascript and custom CSS, will require modifications after Simple Layout is enabled.

Applying the Simple Layout to a Survey

Applying the Simple layout to a survey is quick and easy. Please note that you can only change the layout for 1 survey at a time.

  1. Open the project where you want to enable this experience.
    Look and Feel tab open with Simple Layout highlighted
  2. Go to Look and feel.
  3. Select the Layout tab.
  4. Select Simple.
  5. Click Apply to save your changes.

If your survey has elements that are incompatible with the Simple layout, then a message will appear on the screen explaining this, and the layout will not be applied to your survey. See the Currently Unsupported Survey Features section for advice on how to resolve these issues.

Overview of Improvements

The Simple layout strives to introduce improvements to the survey-taking experience, so that it is more accessible, usable, and mobile-friendly. The following is a list of questions the Simple layout has updated:

Qtip: These questions are the most commonly used in the platform, meaning these improvements will affect the experience of the majority of survey-takers.

This layout also updates the following survey features for survey-takers:

Qtip: The features listed in this section have been updated from the point of view of the person taking the survey; these updates do not necessarily add changes to the survey builder where these settings are edited.

Highlights and Updates

The Simple layout includes a number of qualitative updates to provide a cleaner and more visually-appealing survey-taking experience. This section is by no means comprehensive, but calls out some of the larger updates this layout introduces to the survey-taking experience.

Layout and navigation

The navigation user interface has always been mirrored for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew. Now, however, both buttons appear on the same side to improve visibility.

Example: In Arabic, both the “Next” and “Back” buttons will be left-aligned, with the “Next” button appearing to the furthest left.

A screenshot of a survey in Arabic; the next and back buttons appear as described, where they are grouped together along the left.

Clear response expectations

This layout includes increased visual signals for different state changes to help the survey-taker better understand what kinds of responses they are expected to give.

Example: Here is a text entry question. Note how the field changes appearance based on whether it is empty, selected, being typed in, or already has a value entered.

A question that sauys "Hello there! Type a uick summary of your request below." As the field is clicked and typed in, the highlighting and boldness of the text box's outline changes based on the current state

Example: This is a multiple choice question in the dropdown format. Note the difference in how it looks when not selected, when hovered over, when a choice is selected, and so on.
Gif of cursor clicking on dropdown menu titled 'Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our company'

Example: This is a multiple choice question in the select box format. Note the differences when you haven’t clicked it, when items are selected, when the box is being hovered over, and so on.

Gif of the highlighted row in a select box being moved around and changing appearance as the field is clicked into or out of

Example: In this Likert matrix, when a survey-taker hovers over a row, it is highlighted to communicate the survey-taker’s current focus state.

Matrix table question titled 'Rate the following statements' with the first Strongly Agree selected

Response requirements and validation

Any questions that have Force Response enabled will have an asterisk ( * ) at the beginning of the question to indicate the required response. Validation errors are displayed after a survey-taker presses the “Next” button, summarizing any answers they may need to fix on that page of the survey.

The top banner communicates the number of errors on the page. The buttons (“Go to first issue,” “Go to next issue,” and “Go to end”) help the user resolve errors more quickly by guiding them through each error. When an error is resolved, the user is automatically advanced to the next error. The last error allows you to scroll past it to progress to the next page of the survey.

Alert at the top of the image stating there are two issues to fix, below Matrix table with alert that response is required

Qtip: When the background color of a survey is customized, errors colors maintain acceptable color contrast ratios.

A series of images of the same survey with different background and highlight colors, to feature how the error colors don't change Empty multiple choice with Response Required alert above

Empty multiple choice with Response Required alert above, background is bright red and text is white Empty multiple choice with Response Required alert above, background is white, text is black, and alert is red

Mobile-Friendly

Example: For accessibility, the Likert matrix adapts to small screen sizes (such as mobile devices) by switching to an accordion view instead of a table view. Each question statement is expanded by default to display the choices. When the survey-taker scrolls down past the statement, the row will automatically collapse.

Two multiple choice dropdowns, both open, with custom header

Qtip: By default, Likert matrix tables adapt to the accordion view on small screen sizes for accessibility. You will not be able to turn this setting off while the Simple layout is applied.

Screenshot of the "Mobile-friendly" setting

Example: NPS® questions are highly responsive to touch on mobile, and display clearer visual cues for light touch (equivalent to desktop “hover”), click, and so on.

Image of smartphone with multiple choice question open on it

Keyboarding, screen readers, and assistive technologies

Qualtrics is subject to browser and operating system defaults for different keyboarding and screen reader behavior. Although we can guarantee that the Simple layout meets accessibility standards, we cannot confirm exact behavior for keyboarding and screen readers.

For example, when the survey taker is navigating through answers in a question, 1 browser may announce the total number of answers available. (E.g., “Selecting radio button 1 of 5.) However, another browser may not, instead just reading off the text of an answer without saying how many there are in total. In cases like these, we recommend incorporating the total number of options into the text of the question so all survey takers get the same information ahead of time. (E.g., “Choose 1 answer from the following 5 options.”)

This section goes over a few common examples of keyboarding, screen reader, and assistive technology improvements introduced by the Simple layout. Your chosen operating system or screen reader may not exactly match what’s described.

Example: This is a single-answer multiple choice question. Pressing Tab selects the first answer in the list, and arrow keys can be used to navigate through the rest. Answer choices are automatically selected as the user moves through them. Once the user finishes and moves onto the next question, the answer choice will display a selected state.

Gif of multiple choice question, clicking through each option from top to bottom

In addition, pressing Space will deselect the answer choice on a multiple-answer question.

Example: For questions with force response validation, an asterisk will appear before the question text, setting the expectation that this question is required. The asterisk is configured to work with assistive technologies like screen readers to communicate “required” when focusing on the field.

Multiple choice question with an 'aria-required = true' next to highlighted title

Other improvements to questions

Text entry questions are now consistent in size based on type. This is to help survey takers more easily identify the type of answers required for the field.

Survey builders can resize the width for single line text boxes and resize both width and height for multiple line text boxes. In addition, survey takers can adjust the height of multiple line and essay fields by dragging and dropping the corner.

The password text box type comes with an icon to indicate that it is a password field.

Image of 4 text entries titles Single line, Multiple lines, Essay text box, and Password

Currently Unsupported Survey Features

Qtip: Try selecting the Simple layout before you build your survey! Features that are incompatible with the layout will be clearly greyed out, so you won’t be able to add them to your survey.
Attention: Response requirements must be added to the survey after enabling the Simple layout.

Certain features are not yet compatible with the Simple layout. As a result, if you try to apply a Simple layout to a survey with incompatible features, you may receive a warning message.

Popup box saying survey is using a matrix table which the simple layout does not support

In order to resolve this issue, first make sure that you are only using question types and features that are currently compatible with this layout.

See also the list of Changes to Question Configurations.

Qtip: If you’re having problems resolving incompatibility issues, try emptying the trash, located at the bottom of the survey builder. Whenever you delete a question, it is moved to the trash. Your trash will hold all deleted questions until you empty it, at which point the items are permanently deleted.

For additional troubleshooting, here are some features that are not yet supported by the Simple layout:

Changes to Survey Configurations

When the project has the Simple layout applied, you may notice small changes to the survey builder. For one, only certain question types are available, based on what’s supported by the layout. There are also a few changes to additional question options available. These restrictions are meant to coincide with improvements to accessibility, usability, and survey methodological accuracy, making it easier for you to build a better survey by narrowing your choices down.

The following is a list of question and survey options that are not available with the Simple Layout:

  • Static themes
    Qtip: In place of static themes, Brand Administrators can create branded themes for the whole company to use, which are compatible with the Simple Layout. See the Themes Tab for more details.
  • Options removed from Matrix table: Likert questions
    • Adjust column width
    • Repeat headers
    • Add whitespace