Tuesday, January 27, 2009

CheckBoxLists and Branching

The ability to dynamically select follow-up questions based on the user's current responses and/or sensor states is a powerful feature in MyExperience. For example, with MyExperience you might ask, "On a scale of a 1-10, how exhausted are you feeling right now (1=Not Exhausted, 10=Very Exhausted)." You could then dynamically branch to a set of questions if the participant indicates that they are exhausted (e.g., a response greater than or equal to 7).

MyExperience offers many different ways of specifying question branches from within response options to short scripts. These different methods are covered here. A common question, however, is with regards to how MyExperience and CheckBoxList branching works. CheckBoxLists allow the participant to select more than one answer, each with their own specific branch in the survey.

The CheckBoxWorkOut example (available here, see Example 1) demonstrates the power of branching with CheckBoxLists and using parameterized question text. Observe how MyExperience's branching functionality loops over each of the response options in the CheckBoxList and then finally pursues the main trunk of the survey after all branches have been exhausted. This example also highlights the usage of the special options: "All of the above" and "None of the above." Note that you must have version 0.8.2 or later to run this example.

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