(DA-7) Working with Questions

When you define an activity, you can also specify any number of questions to as your clients as they go through the booking process.

This lesson looks in detail at how to define and manage the question creation process.

The Questions Area

To see the questions associated with an activity, you first have to "go inside" the activity. In this case we will use the Yoga Retreat activity, as it already has some questions defined:

A list of the questions that have been defined for the activity is shown:

Managing the Question List

There are a few functions we can manage from question list itself.

Question Order

One aspect of questions is the order in which they appear on the booking form. This is the order they appear in the question list here.

To move a question up the the list:

To move a question down the list

Adding a New Question

Deleting Questions

To delete a question:

The question will then appear on the left like this:

There is currently no option to hide the deleted questions from the list on the left hand side.

Working with the Details of a Question

Let's work through the the detail and options for adding Questions. We will use the Yoga Weekend activity as the example activity.

A new question entry appears on the right side:

Let's walk through how each field in this form works...

Question Topic

We need some easy way to refer to what a question is about. This is done using a set of "Question Topics" which are common across all of your activities. This method means that if you move an attendee from one activity to another, their responses will neatly drop in to the collection of responses for the new activity as each responses will share a common Topic.

The is a list of pre-defined Question Topics, which is as follows:

To add, remove and hide items on the list:

Try to keep the Question Topic options as generic as possible. Do not add options that are specific to one activity and then another similar option which is specific to another activity.

Question

This is the text of the actual question as your client will see it on the booking form.

If you feel the question needs some additional explanation:

Question Type

This is the type of information that the question is looking to be answered with. There are lots of options available... here is the complete list of what they are:

  • Text: a typed text answer (2 lines)

  • Text Small: a typed text answer (1 line)

  • Text Large: a typed text answer (4 lines)

  • Text Extra Large: a typed text answer (8 lines)

  • Number: a typed number value

  • Yes/No: a response of only Yes or No.

  • Age Range - a value from the age ranges you have defined in Contacts

  • Gender - a value from the genders you have defined in Contacts

  • Region - a value from the regions you have defined in Contacts

  • Location - a text box will be presented to your client and the value stored in their location/address field

  • Mailing Permission - A Yes/No response as to whether the client gives you permission to add them to your marketing mailing list

  • Terms and Conditions - The question text is followed by a link to your terms and conditions page as linked to in the Business Settings area of the app. There is only a single response of 'I agree'

  • Privacy Policy - The question text is followed by a link to your privacy policy page as linked to in the Business Settings area of the app. There is only a single response of 'I agree'

  • Price Single Selection: a choice of an optional extra item from a list defined by a "Price Group"

  • Text Single Selection: one response can be chosen from a list

  • Number Single Selection: a single number can be chosen from a list

When choosing one of these last two possibilities, you list the options to be presented to your client in the Options box which appears, separated by commas. In the following example, your client will be presented with a list of experience levels to choose from:

Answers to the Age Range, Gender, Region and Location questions are stored in the Contact's record.

Further Switch Options

The further options work as follows:

Add a comment box - When set, this gives your clients a selparate text box in which to write comments to elaborate on a question that has a set of fixed answers

Response is required - When set, this requires your client to give a response to this question before they can move on to finalise their booking.

Question hidden - When set, the question will remain in the list of questions, but will not be shown to the user.

Response added to arrival list - there is a process to create an arrival list for your activity, and if set, this will add all the attendee's responses to this question to that list so you have the responses available as they arrive. This option does not have to be set as the responses come in - it can be set just before the arrival list is created and all the responses will be added.

Question Templates

As you go deeper into defining different activities, you will find you want to ask different combinations of the same questions.

To make this easier to manage, Workshop Angel has the concept of Question Templates, which you can copy to an individual activity you are working with.

To go to the Question Template area:

In this area you can create and edit questions in the same way you can within an activity.

To copy a Question Template to an activity:

The template question will now be copied to the activity.

Building Up Your Common Questions

We recommend that you create your most common questions as Question Templates and then copy them to your individual activities as required.

Please note that questions are copied from the templates area to an activity... so if you make a change to a template then that change will not be reflected in the activities where that template question has been copied.

Summary

Wow, that was quite a lot of information to take in about Questions... let's have a quick recap...

We have seen how each activity can have any number of questions. The questions are listed on the left side when you go "inside" an activity, and from here you can change the order of the questions and add new ones.

When editing a question, you have to give it a generic Topic, and these topics are best to keep common between different activities. You also add the question text itself, an optional explanation to the question, and then define the question type in terms of the kind of response that can be given.

We have covered how there are a number of options that allow you to control the display of a comments box, to make a response be required, to hide the question, and to add the response to the activity's arrival list.

Finally, we have looked at the details of how to define your common questions as templates, and then copy the ones you need to each activity you create.

So lots of detail here... in the next lesson we will look at lots of question examples so it makes more sense as to how to put all these options together.

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