Building
A builder that gets out of the way.
The form builder is a drag-and-drop editor with a palette of 17 entries covering 16 question kinds, grouped into Text, Choice, Scales & ratings, Advanced and Layout. You drag a question in, edit it in place, and choose how it looks — bento option tiles or a plain list, with optional images, descriptions and inline headings on any question.
Everything below is in the product today. Nothing on this page describes a plan.
The palette
The left-hand palette is grouped rather than alphabetical, because you almost never go looking for "Linear scale" — you go looking for "something with a 1 to 5 on it". The five groups are:
Text
Typed answers, from a single line to a paragraph, plus the numeric and pre-validated variants.
Choice
Pick one, pick several, pick from a menu, or drag a set of options into order.
Scales & ratings
Stars, 1-to-n scales with end labels, grids of rows sharing one scale, and a 0–10 recommend score.
Advanced
Dates, file uploads and address capture with a postcode check.
Layout
Section headings and page breaks — structure rather than a question.
That is 17 palette entries for 16 underlying kinds: Phone is a Short text with a phone validation preset already applied, not a separate type. The full breakdown is on the question types reference.
How answer options are presented
Multiple choice and checkbox questions render as bento option
tiles by default — uniform-height cards rather than a column of
radio buttons. Tiles are easier to hit on a phone and give an option
room to carry an image and a description line. The alternative is a
plain list, set per question with the optionStyle setting.
Tiles reflow to one per row once a label runs past roughly 110 characters, because a long label in a narrow tile is worse than a long label on a full-width row. You do not have to manage that; the layout decides.
What an option can carry
- An image. Useful when the choice is a thing rather than a word — a bin size, a room layout, a logo.
- A description line. Secondary text under the label, for the caveat that would otherwise bloat the label itself.
- A fixed flag. Marks the option as excluded from randomisation, which is how "None of the above" and "Prefer not to say" stay at the bottom.
"Other (please specify)"
An option can open a free-text box. The typed value is stored separately from the option label, so exports keep the two apart and you are not left grepping a choice column for stray prose. That text is kept only while the question is still visible and the option is still selected — deselect it, or hide the question through conditional logic, and the orphaned text goes with it.
Images, headings and layout controls
Any question can take an image, placed top, left, right or bottom, at one of three sizes. Side-placed images match the height of the question they sit beside, so a row of questions does not turn into a ragged column of mismatched blocks.
Any question can also carry an inline heading. This sounds minor and is not: without it, every "Part 2: About your household" needs its own Section card, which adds a step to the flow in conversational and paged layouts. An inline heading puts the label on the question that follows it and leaves the flow alone. Section questions still exist for genuine page breaks.
Answer randomisation
Option order can be randomised to reduce order bias. The shuffle is seeded per page load, so a respondent who presses Back sees the same order they saw a moment ago rather than a fresh permutation — a reshuffle on Back is how you lose people's trust in a long questionnaire. Options marked fixed are skipped by the shuffle and stay where you put them.
Themes
Each survey has its own accent colour. Partner and collaborator logos are also set per survey rather than per account, which is covered on the co-branding page — one workspace can badge a different local authority on every survey it runs.
Three respondent layouts, one builder
You build once and choose how it is presented. The layout is a survey setting, not a different editor:
Classic
One scrolling page. Best when respondents want to see the whole thing before committing, or need to scroll back.
Conversational
One question at a time. One-tap questions advance on their own, so a ten-question survey is ten taps.
Paged
A section per screen. The right shape for long structured questionnaires that already have parts and headings.
Validation you set while building
Validation is configured on the question, not bolted on afterwards. Available rules: required, minimum and maximum length with a live character counter, numeric range, email, phone, URL, UK postcode, and a custom regular expression with your own error message. The Address question checks the postcode component as part of its own validation.
The point of validating in the browser is to catch the typo while the respondent is still looking at the field. It is not a security control — response caps and close dates are enforced by a database trigger rather than the interface, precisely because responses insert straight from the browser.
Where to go next
- Every question type, with its stored kind and its notable settings, in one table.
- Conditional logic and piping — how questions appear, disappear, and quote earlier answers.
- Scoring and bands — turning a form into a quiz or a readiness assessment.
- The product overview, if you would rather see the whole thing at once.
Open the builder and drag something in.
Everything on this page is in the product today: the grouped palette, the option tiles, the images, the headings and the validation rules. Drag a question onto the canvas and set it up in the panel on the right.
- 17 palette entries, grouped by what you are looking for
- Bento option tiles or a plain list, set per question
- Classic, conversational or paged — a setting, not a rebuild
