Guides are being
written now.

What already exists, and is probably what you wanted

The feature pages are written as reference material rather than as marketing, so a good half of the guides list below is already covered somewhere on the site. If you have a specific job in front of you, one of these will get you further today than waiting for an article:

• The 16 question types — what each one is for, including the difference between a rating, a linear scale and a recommend score, and when a matrix is worth the width.
• Conditional logic — show and hide rules, any versus all matching, and how branching interacts with scoring.
• Scoring and quizzes — per-choice scores, per-question weights, and percentage bands on the thank-you screen.
• Save and continue — resume links, and why long surveys need one.
• Exports — how a matrix and an “Other” answer come out in the CSV, and when a per-response PDF is the right artefact.
• Accessibility — what the respondent experience is built against, and what that means for how you write questions.

For task-level questions — where a setting lives, why a question is not appearing — the help centre is the faster route. For vocabulary, the glossary defines the terms these guides will use without stopping to explain them.

What the guides will cover

Listed here so you can tell us which one to write first. None of these are published yet.

The short version, while you wait

If you never read another word of this section, five rules cover most of what the guides will say.

Ask fewer people more questions, not everyone everything

What a respondent experiences is not the length of your survey but the length of their path through it. Branch early on the question that determines the shape of the rest — journey type, role, whether they used the service — and let logic hide the sections that do not apply. A long survey can present a short one to any given person.

Reuse a scale instead of inventing one per question

Respondents learn a scale once and then answer quickly. Switching between a five-point agreement scale, a ten-point satisfaction scale and a star rating in the same survey slows everyone down and makes the results harder to compare. Where the same scale repeats, use a matrix.

Write the analysis before you write the questions

Sketch the chart or the sentence you want at the end — “X% of residents supported the proposal, rising to Y% among people who cycle” — and work backwards. Questions that do not feed a sentence you intend to write are questions you are asking out of politeness.

Pilot with ten people

Ten pilot responses will find the ambiguous wording, the missing option and the branch that dead-ends. Then clear the test responses, which also removes their uploads and any partially saved sessions, so your real data starts clean.

Decide the ending in advance

Set the close date, the response cap and the closed message before the link goes out. Both the cap and the date are enforced by a database trigger rather than the interface, so a survey stays shut once it is shut.

Request a guide

The order these get written in is decided by what people ask for. If you are stuck on something specific — a consultation methodology, a scoring model, a matrix that will not fit on a phone — send it over from the contact page and it will go near the top of the list. In the meantime, the template structures sketch out thirty surveys by sector, and the resources index lists everything else published on this site.