Skip logic, or conditional branching as it is sometimes known, allows you to change the course that your respondents take through a survey based on answers they give to certain questions. You do this by creating skip rules. For example, if you were creating a survey, and you were to ask your respondents if they are male or female. You could create some skip rules based on this, that would then direct them to a certain page based on their response.

There are a number of reasons why you should use skip logic. If you have questions that are only related to some of your respondents, then you would not want your other respondents to be presented with these questions, as they will get frustrated when asked to answer questions that do not relate to them. You can also use skip logic to filter out certain respondents. For instance if you only want people who live in California to respond to your survey, then the first question you would ask them is what state they live in, you could then create a skip rule that forces all of the users who did not choose California to end the survey.

In my example below, I created a survey with 4 pages. The first page contains two questions, each with skip logic applied. If respondents are female and 16 years or older, they will be presented with all questions in the survey. If respondents are male under 16, they will only be presented with one question, because we applied skip logic to the initial questions telling the survey engine to skip pages 2 and 3 as they pertain only to females or respondents over 16.

The first skip logic rule that I created was to skip Page 2 (relevant only to respondents over 16 years old) if the respondent’s age is under 16.

The second skip logic rule that I created was to skip Page 3 (relevant only to female respondents) if the respondent is male.

Click here to see the survey in action.