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New Survey Taking Experience

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About the New Survey Taking Experience

The new survey taking experience, formally called the Simple Layout, is designed to simplify your survey building tools while also making the resulting survey more mobile-friendly, easy to use, and accessible for your respondents.

Benefits of this experience include:

  • Overall usability: Modernized user interface of surveys to meet evolving web design standards, as well as the latest AI enhancements, powered by an updated web framework.
  • Mobile-friendly: Surveys are optimized for taking on mobile, meeting respondents where they are and setting the foundation for the interaction models of the future.
  • Accessibility: Surveys meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards for key features, the full list of which can be found in Overview of Improvements.
  • Additional question types: Access additional question types, such as the Solicit Reviews Question.
Qtip: For the best results, we recommend enabling this experience before building a survey, as some features may not be compatible. For example, custom Javascript and custom CSS may require modifications after this experience is enabled.

Activating the New Experience

Activating the new survey taking experience for a survey is quick and easy. Please note this must be done individually for each survey, and you can only do this for 1 survey at a time.

  1. Open the survey where you want to enable this experience.
    survey open with look and feel tab highlighted
  2. Go to Look and feel.
  3. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to activate the new survey taking experience. Click Upgrade to activate it for this survey.
    new survey taking experience pop-up window

    Attention: If you click Don’t show again, the pop-up won’t appear for you in any survey when using your current browser. If you access Qualtrics in a different browser, you will see the pop-up.

Some elements in your survey, such as custom CSS and Javascript code, may be affected when switching to the new experience. See the Currently Unsupported Survey Features section for more information.

Overview of Improvements

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

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 using the new survey taking experience.

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 New Survey Taking Experience 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 New Survey Taking Experience. 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 Question Improvements

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

Question and Feature Updates

The new survey taking experience strives to introduce improvements that make the survey-taking experience more accessible, usable, and mobile-friendly. This includes updates to the following questions and survey features:

Questions

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

Survey Features

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.

Currently Unsupported Survey Features

Attention: Response requirements must be added to the survey after enabling the New Survey Taking Experience.

When your project has the new survey taking experience enabled, you may notice small changes to the survey builder. For one, only certain question types are available, based on what’s supported. Some features are also not yet compatible with the new survey taking experience. 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 down your choices.

If you try to activate the new experience in a survey with incompatible features, you may receive a warning message. To resolve this issue, first make sure that you are only using question types and features that are currently compatible with this experience.

For additional troubleshooting, these are the features not yet supported by the new survey taking experience:

Reverting to the Legacy Experience

You can turn off the new survey taking experience and return to the legacy experience within Survey Options.

  1. Open the project where you want to disable the new experience.
  2. Click Survey Options.
    toggle to turn off the new survey taking experience
  3. Go to the General tab.
  4. Click the toggle to turn off the new survey taking experience.

After reverting to the legacy experience, you can enable the new experience again at any time. The process is different from the first time it was enabled.

  1. Go to Look and feel.
    tile to upgrade to the new survey taking experience from the layouts tab
  2. Select the Layout tab.
  3. Click the tile Upgrade to the new survey taking experience.