Best Practices for Building Pruvan Surveys

Here are some best practices for creating a survey in the Pruvan Survey Manager. These are the same steps that the Pruvan Team uses when they create a survey and find that these steps make creating a survey less confusing.

1. Organize Survey Questions

• Add all of the questions to the Survey Builder first, by just adding the question ID
  • You can go through setting up each question later
• Use the Questions ID to help identify your Questions
• For groups of similar questions, like multiple questions about Shrubs, add a section for it. Then put all the the related questions in that section
  • For a section that is based on the answer to a trigger question, leave the trigger question out of, and before, the section
  • ie Are there Shrubs?  Should be in the main question list before the Shrubs section
• For multiple questions about Shrubs add Shrubs to the beginning of your Question ID
  • Shrubs-Yes/No, then Shrubs-HowBig
  • This idea extends down to sub grouping
    • Shrubs-Oversized-Bid
    • Shrubs-RegSize-Trim
  • This will help when adding Answer Triggers later
• Drag your questions to move and group them together, and put them in the order they should appear
• Add 'control questions' to your survey.  These are questions that can be used to trigger groups of questions to appear.  
  • Such as the shrub example above.  If you have a bunch of shrub questions, insert a shrub control question like (Are there shrubs?) before them.  This will allow you to set up a trigger later so that if the answer is 'no' none of those questions appear.
  • The goal of setting up control questions and triggers is to allow the survey to be taken as quickly as possible by not having to sort through unnecessary questions.  This also provides reliability as a user will trust that if a question is present that it definitely needs to be answered.
  • Control questions do not need to all be yes / no questions.  If you have a series of control questions, like; Are there shrubs?, Are there trees?, Is there a pool?, Is the yard overgrown?, etc..  Then consider a Choose Multiple question.  The user will be able to check all applicable areas of interest and you can trigger those answer options individually.
    

2. Set Up Sections and Questions

For Questions:

• Add the question text
• choose the question type
• add any appropriate answer options
• Add any photo requirements
  • Add all Photo Requirements to the questions that you would like photos taken on
  • Videos are not distinguished from photos in Pruvan Surveys
  • Make sure to change the answer option that triggers the photo requirements to ensure the users only take photos when you would like them to
    

For Sections:

• Go through and set the correct section options
• Sections can be set up to only appear once or repeat, either indefinitely or up to a max number of times
  • This can be useful for questions that need to be repeated an unknown number of times, such as questions that need to be answered for each bedroom in a house, just let the user repeat the section for how ever many bedrooms are present
• Sections can not be nested, that is contain other sections
  • Additionally only questions at the top (root) level may trigger (enable) sections

3. Answer Triggers

• Now that all of the questions have been added and set up you can add the Answer Triggers
• Use the Question ID's  and sections that you set up to help you enable the correct questions when setting up the Answer Triggers
• You can have multiple levels, or tiers, of answer triggers
• Be sure that you only select the "1st tier" questions you want enabled
  • A multi-tier example
  • All of your 'enabled by default' questions are tier-0, they show up no matter what
    • Any of these can be tier-0 control questions
    • Control questions are questions with answer triggers, that enable a sub-tier
    • A tier-1 question is a question that only appears if a given answer is selected from a tier-0 question
  • Go to a tier-0 control question and set the answer trigger to enable only tier-1 questions
    • Do NOT select all sub-tier questions, only tier-1s
  • Go to a tier-1 control question and set the answer trigger to enable only tier-2 questions
  • Go to a tier-2 control question and set the answer trigger to enable only tier-3 quesitons
  • Continue this process, as needed, for all sub-tiers
  
  

4. Save Frequently

• Make sure to save your survey frequently. If you accidentally navigate to a different page without saving first all of you hard work will be lost

5. Test Your Survey

• Use the Preview button to test your survey
• The Survey Preview dialog will allow you to exercise your Survey and enter data and add Photos just like a user would

6. Publishing

• Only Publish the Survey when you have Finished it
• Every time a survey is published a new version number is added to the end of the Template ID
• The version number will need to be changed on any integration that supports attaching surveys to Pruvan projects.  New surveys will not push down to the field unless this is done