Matrix question

What a matrix is for

A matrix compresses repetition. If you want to know how satisfied people are with eight council services on the same five-point scale, asking eight separate questions means writing the scale out eight times and making the respondent re-read it eight times. A matrix states the scale once across the top and lists the eight services down the side.

That is the whole benefit, and it is a real one: it shortens the page and it makes comparison across rows explicit, because the respondent can see their own previous answers while giving the next.

A worked example

Three rows, one scale, one question card. In the export this becomes three columns — satisfaction_bins, satisfaction_roads, satisfaction_parks — because three separate measurements were taken. NumoForms writes a matrix to CSV as one column per row for exactly this reason; a single column containing "Satisfied, Dissatisfied, Very satisfied" would be unusable.

Common mistakes

• Rows that do not share a scale. The moment one row needs a different set of options, it is not a matrix row. Split it out. Forcing it into the grid produces answers that mean something other than what the column header says.
• Too many rows. Beyond roughly eight, respondents start straight-lining — picking the same column all the way down to get out of the grid. That looks like data and is not.
• Too many columns. Five or seven points is readable. Ten columns on a phone is a horizontal scroll and a guess.
• Using a matrix as a checkbox list. A grid where every cell is independently tickable is a different question type with different analysis. If you want "tick all that apply", use checkboxes.

Matrices, mobile and accessibility

A grid is the question type most likely to fail on a small screen and the one most likely to be miserable with a screen reader, because a cell has meaning only from its row and its column together. If a respondent cannot tell which row they are in, the answer is a guess.

Two practical rules. Keep row labels short enough to read at a glance — "Bin collections", not "The frequency and reliability of household waste collections in your area". And never use a matrix for something a respondent must get right, such as a consent grid; ask those as individual questions. WCAG does not forbid grids, but it does require that the relationships in the table are conveyed to assistive technology, and a grid you have squeezed until it fits is usually the first thing to break that.

In NumoForms

Matrix is one of the 16 question types, with rows sharing a single scale. Rows can carry the same Likert-style agreement wording as any standalone scale question, and each row exports to its own column. If the grid is only there to save space rather than to invite comparison, consider individual closed-ended questions with conditional logic instead — the survey will be longer on paper and shorter in practice. Full details on the question types page.