Ranked/Ordered List in a User Survey Form

[Alfie_Dennen]

Hi everyone, Airtable noob here and am hoping someone has a workaround to an issue I have.

I am creating a user survey where I ask users order each list entry based on their own priority of importance.

Most survey software has this drag and drop functionality baked in but I cannot find a way to emulate or otherwise achieve this.

Any help at all super appreciated as I need to get it out soon.

[Bill_French]

Hi @Alfie_Dennen, and welcome to the community!

Alfie_Dennen:

Most survey software has this drag and drop functionality baked in but I cannot find a way to emulate or otherwise achieve this.

Yeah, trying to compete with tools in survey sector is not really in Airtable’s wheelhouse.

Airtable is about data and collecting data. Surveys are a slice of data collection, but a very specific one that tenuously depends on behaviors the likes of which you have indicated. A poorly-designed survey will result in poor responses and in some case, very little data.

My recommendation - consider integrating a professional survey platform (such as Survey Monkey) with Airtable via Zapier. Zapier supports both platforms and makes it possible for anyone to instrument a solution in an hour or less.

[Alfie_Dennen]

Hi Bill, thanks!

This makes sense and for ongoing surveys I’ll likely link Google forms with zapier, but it seems to me that since airtable supports most straightforward survey requirements (you can even hack in specific trees depending on a given response) that the addition of a sortable list for users would complete a ‘basic’ set of survey tools and frankly make it competitive (at least for me). The sort of analysis survey monkey et al allows post-survey is nowhere near as good as what you can do with airtable.

[Bill_French]

Alfie_Dennen:

since airtable supports most straightforward survey requirements (you can even hack in specific trees depending on a given response) that the addition of a sortable list for users would complete a ‘basic’ set of survey tools and frankly make it competitive (at least for me)

Yeah - I get it. We all want to mitigate the number of gears in the machine and for many reasons. This is not unreasonable and without seeing the entire set of survey requirements, it’s not wise for anyone to second-guess your approach.

However, from experience, as soon as one hack is employed in a solution, you need to be prepared for many additional workarounds to get to a “perfect” solution", so brace yourself. :winking_face:

I’m not really an expert in matters involving surveys but I have recently deployed an SMS-based survey system for an Airtable client. They have a table of brief questions and another table of responses. The SMS process uses Twilio (and the API) to send questions to respondents that have opted-in and they simply answer with y/n or other 1,2,3,… responses.

I guess we live in a texty world now because this has increased their response participation by 75%. Also, this is how most of the NPS score companies are operating now. It’s a little more complex than using forms, but once the framework is in place, there are huge advantages.