Text Box

The text box is one of the most common survey fields, widely used to collect different sorts of feedback. Text boxes are usually used to collect short answers from participants, in text form. If you need the respondets to give you longer answers, e.g. more than 10 words we strongly recomment you to use our Comment Box feature.

Settings

After adding a Text Box question to your survey, click or tap on it to activate the Edit Mode and access the settings panel.
You can easily customise the Text Box, to ask the type of question that works best for your questionnaire. Text Box offers the following customization possibilities:

By enabling this settings, you will demand the respondents to answer this question. So when this setting is ON, we notify the respondents with a visual clue, that they cannot continue to next page or submit the survey, before answering the question, which in this case is typing some text.

Read more about when you ‘should’ or ‘should not’ make answering compulsory in your online questionnaires.

Enabling this setting will allow you to add a large, edge-to-edge image right under the question. If your question needs further explanation using a picture or illustration, you can easily upload it here. Read more about best practices of adding pictures to survey questions.

Additionally, you can add a custom link to the picture after you upload one. Linked images can act as banners, helping you promote something or add incentives for your respondents to finish a survey. They can also help you create download links, or lead users to other pages or your other surveys. Read more about adding links pictures in your survey.

Sometimes you may need to explain further, or add tips or instructions for your respondents. Enabling this feature will activate an extra text box in which you can type these instructions. By default, these additional instructions appear as a little button with a question mark inside them, right under the question text. When clicked, they expand and show your additional text.

Instead, if you prefer to constantly display this text, please activate “Always visible instructions” option. This will directly display the additional instructions under the question, and respondents do not have to manually click on it to display it. Read more about adding further instructions or tips for survey questions.

You may need to limit participant input, based on your type of question, and SurveyLegend provides this possibility for you. When you are in edit mode for a text box, you can adjust its “Input format”. In this way, you can adjust which kind of input your participants are expected to type into the text box; and additionally, how parameters for that input, by setting minimum and maximum values for the “Acceptable range”.

You can, for example, adjust a text box to only accept answers with a minimum of 1 word and a maximum of 10 words, by setting the input format to “Words” and the acceptable range to 1 through 10. You can even set a text box to only accept numbers, or limit the answer by the number of characters.

Tip:

if you decide to put limitations on text box based questions, it’s recommended that you inform your participants about it in your question. For example, tell them “Please answer using at least 10 words, and not more than 200 words.”

Note:

When you view your responses in the Live Analytics of your survey, you’ll see a list of all the open-ended responses. When responses are too long, you will need to export them to be able to see the full comment that each participant has provided.