The Most Annoying Thing about this Quiz Platform Will Surprise You

Sometimes I need to send out quizzes for massive amounts of people to take. For this purpose, I make surveys for Mechanical Turk workers to fill out. Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a platform by Amazon for exchanging small tasks for amounts of money. The bigger the task, the larger the payment for the workers (Turkers).

MTurk comes with some templates for these tasks, but the survey template only supports single page surveys. If I want to have multiple pages or some kind of branching logic based on how users respond, I typically embed a survey on a different platform in my hit. Luckily, MTurk has a template for this kind of embedding, and Qualtrics has some tools that integrate with MTurk!

Qualtrics is a survey-writing platform. It supports many different types of questions, branching logic, etc. The unfortunate thing is that I can’t use my HTML-producing scripts to code Qualtrics survey. Instead, there is a graphical user interface.

I can add, remove, and alter questions. This is accessible for first time users and memorable for casual users. It’s a little inefficient for me since most of my questions are based on a template, changing just the wording or content per question and having the template handle whether the question is required and other settings. This is easy to do in my program. How would I do this in Qualtrics?

I click on the question and check “Force Response” under Validation Option. Then I need to do this for all of my questions. You could say that I could make one question as my template, then “Copy Question” several times. Great, but what if I need to change something else about these questions? Rather than making one change to my program, I have to make the same change to a bunch of questions.

My change for this would be to provide some kind of way to produce a survey from HTML or to make actual templates at the question level. There’s already an option to edit the individual questions in HTML for finer-grained control; it would be nice if such an option existed for the entire survey.

I encountered either a bug or an awful interaction recently for text-input questions. I wanted to make sure that everyone answered this question, so I added a validation type to make sure that the Turker had at least typed something in the box.

Do you see the problem? I didn’t. I previewed this quiz, expecting to have to enter something in the text box. However, the only required question was whether I had read the article!

The two questions above even have the same required “*” next to them! The issue was that I didn’t see the “Force Response” checkbox.

Several things would have helped solve this. Maybe highlighting Validation Options when I entered a validation type for a question that wasn’t required? This highlight could fade away after some time or when I clicked to another part of the survey. Another option is to change the icon since the second question isn’t actually required.

And because this is in a graphical environment rather than a text environment, I had to manually click “Force Response” twenty two times.

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