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Questionnaire Best Practice

JOSHUA CHASSE

Hi Everyone,

We've got a client who has a long form Questionnaire (read 300 questions). They are done with trying to do it in Excel. They need people to sit down and go over these insurance and legal questions with 2-3 dozen individuals. They used to be passing around an Excel questionnaire and the version control on that was a nightmare.

I can see a few paths forward.
A) Property Q1-Q400, all boolean, use configuration to put them into collapsible groups.
B) Have the Questionnaire have a multi-select of Question Items for the groups.


Other considerations,

1. The questions are sometimes a paragraph in size. For A) it might be to put the long form text into the tooltip

2. I think they have a requirement to also have cost tracking (number(real)) on some questions, leaning towards B.


If we go with B), do we just set this up as a template and does the template create copies of those dropdown items?
Or do we try to Make a Copy of the master Questionnaire and use that for clients, and does the Make Copy also make copies of the Dropdown items (as they need to be tied to the parent)?

Any other considerations, or best practices? Instances where you might need to use code to effectuate some of the items.

  • 0 in reply to Craig Hawker

    Yes, I don't think this would work as it is in Word. Their CEO is HEAVILY against MS products, as that is how they ended up in their current predicament.
    Questionnaires, sometimes need to be answered in internet blackout zones. They have up to 24-36 persons that they need to get answers from, and Ment and word do not have the best conflict resolution. Ie: if I give a word document to 24 people that all make changes, answer questions overtop of each other, then try to merge multiple of them back together from different offline states, it would be pretty bad.

    Whereas, I was thinking of pulling each question out into its own object, so it could either be assigned, workflow, taken offline, answered, and they are all related to the parent object. So all these various little changes could happen without needing to checkout the document 24-36 times in various offline states as some people will go offline, fly out to a blackout zone, spend 1-5 days travelling, meet with councils, travel back 1-5 days before they have internet again to try and merge these responses back into the whole.

  • 0 in reply to JOSHUA CHASSE

    Yes, Ment wouldn't work if you have multiple people answering questions on the same form; Ment would work if you have 36 people all needing to fill in their own copy of the form.  But it would require an internet connection anyway so it sounds like that's out of the equation.

    I can see why you're looking to structure it this way using M-Files.  I have some personal concerns about the user experience, but I haven't explicitly tried what you're trying to do.  You'd need to structure all this and also consider how to combine data back again, I assume, into a spreadsheet or similar for whatever future purposes this is being gathered for.

    If this were me, as I really value the UX on questionnaires and the like, I would be looking at dedicated questionnaire software for the actual questionnaire.  Many of these such systems have iPad (etc.) apps which can run offline as they're often used at events with limited networking.  I'd then instead be looking at how to take the data from those questionnaires and import them logically into the vault and process them into Excel or whatever.

    But I think maybe I'm not the right person to be answering this so I'm going to bow out for now.

  • 0 in reply to JOSHUA CHASSE

    As a rule of thumb, I agree with Craig&Joonas. In this case, I will have a couple more suggestions;

    1. you can have your long questions as text. What I mean is, when you have question number 87 with long text you can create a property with property name "87" in multi line text type. You can type your loooooong question with Metadata Card Configuration and lock it. So, you will have Question number on left side and your question in metadata data section (in this case, multi-line text) which is the 75% vertical real estate available
    2. You can add answers with using free Compliance kit feature "Object Creator". New web supports it as well. You can have your "add answer" shortcut on left pane in classic web and desktop app, on right click menu on new web. So, you can add answer to the questions in a new object which automatically be related to the questionnaire
    3. You can have your Questions as Group Names. in MDCC, you can create groups and have long names for them. So, you can have your long question as group and your multi-select or whatever answer can go in that group as properties
    4. You can automatically create new object for every questionnaire with VAF. VBScript would probably cause problems if you gonna try and create 300 new objects for every new questionnaire. If you do, you can have your questions as seperate object and have it shown in a view

    hope this helps. I can explain more in detail if you have "questions" :P 

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