Conditional Response Branching with Google Forms
When push comes to shove, Google Forms ("Forms) is a helpful third-party tool in a pinch and it can be helpful on a budget too. Not to mention reasonable usage limits.
Most of us that choose to live in the 21st century have interacted with Forms for a wide number of use cases. For example, I worked for a small SaaS company that relied on Forms for escalating T3 engineering tickets, configuration, and internal product requests. Forms served as an invaluable bridge to bigger, better, and more expensive tooling to meet the growing and divergent needs of the business. Even after the change over, internally, employees continued to lean on Forms for benefits mentioned above.
What frustrated me (and my co-workers by extension) was the seemingly impossibility of applying conditional question logic to make the experience of creating and responding to Forms simpler and easier to by hiding questions that are not relevant to specific answers.
It may come as a surprise to learn that this feature exist already and that it is not a recent development either. Hiding in plain sight is the option to apply conditional branching logic to Forms. For the few poor souls that can't look hard enough this short blog post is for you. Insert [I was today years old when here].
How to Create Question Logic Branching
In short, users should leverage Forms sections to create a flow through which respondents follow per responses to each question within a given section.
Multiple choice and dropdown questions formats enable the option to "Go to section based on answer" logic. Once the correct question format is selected, next click Ellipsis or symbol [⋮] at the bottom right-hand corner of a section as shown in the screenshot below. Note that any one response can be redirected to any one section including the same section or directly to the end of the survey if you like.
Link to Forms: https://forms.gle/FADrP8kRQ6Yx7yqJ7
The Backend: Google Sheets
You may choose to save response data to a corresponding Google Sheet ("Sheets") as I have done in the example below. Even though all questions were configured to require an answer, the first submission left [blank] cells which means the questions were in fact skipped, which means that the conditional logic was executed correctly. Moreover, blank cells may not be appropriate for your analysis. If that is the case, consider adding conditional formatting and formulas to enter information for blank responses.
To take your Forms to another level Google provides documentation for how unlock more value with Google App Script.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/forms
Happy Data Collecting!