How to Show or Hide Questions with Display Logic

With Display Logic you can dynamically show/hide elements or entire pages from your participants based on their previous answers. Here is a very simply example of what you can achieve:

How do I apply Display Logic?

First, you need to create the element or page that you want to dynamically show or hide. For each element and page, you can find the “Display Logic” icon in the toolbar (“Eye” icon). A click on the icon will open a panel with a list of questions that can be used as “triggers”.

Display Logic applied to an element

Display Logic applied to a page

These questions and answers can be used as “triggers” to show/hide the element or page. In order to achieve the simple example shown at the beginning of this page, you would need to:

  1. Go to question “Why not?” and click on the “Eye” icon (Display Logic)
  2. Select “Show element only if:”
  3. Then, select question “Do you like cats?” and answer “No” from the list
  4. And hit “Save”

 

Answer “No” is now the “trigger” that will show question “Why not?” when selected.

Display Logic can also be applied across pages, meaning you could e.g. hide a question in a later page, based on an answer in a previous page.

Which questions can be used as triggers?

When opening the “Display Logic” panel, you will see a list of questions from your survey that can be used as triggers. However, you will not see all your questions in the panel. This is because:

  1. Display Logic can only be triggered by answers from “closed” questions
    These are questions with a fixed set of possible answers – unlike “open” questions, where the participant can type any text-based answer they choose. Some examples of “closed” questions are Multiple Choice, Drop-Down, Rating, etc.
  2. Display Logic can only be triggered by answers from previous questions
    These are questions which are located before the element you are trying to apply the conditions to, from the same page and from previous pages.

What if I select multiple triggers?

If you select multiple answers from one single question as triggers, then only one of these answers must be selected to trigger the Display Logic (“or” condition).

If you select answers from multiple questions as triggers, then at least one answer per question must be selected to trigger the Display Logic (“and” condition).

What different display options do I have?

You can choose to either “show” or “hide” an element (or page) if the participant selects specific answers from other questions. Whether you want to “show” or “hide” something can be set from within the panel:

If you select “Show”, then the target element will be hidden by default and only shown when the defined conditions are met. If you select “Hide”, then target element will be visible by default and only hidden when the defined conditions are met.

Difference to Skip Logic

Another way to skip irrelevant questions is to use “Skip Logic“. Skip Logic allows to jump pages, and therefore to skip entire sections of a survey at once. It even allows to redirect a participant to the end of the survey immediately (“screen out”). However, this is not done “live”, but only when going to the next page.