What is Piping?
Piping allows users to repeat, or carry forward, previously collected answers into future questions.
Why Use Piping?
When used correctly, piping creates a better respondent experience! Piping creates a more dynamic and personalized survey experience for users. It helps remind users what they have answered previously, reducing respondent fatigue and improving data quality/consistency.
For Suzy clients, piping can help save on costs by increasing programming efficiency and reducing the number of questions needed in a survey! Piping also reduces duplicative and contradictory data, saving time when it comes to data quality checks and cleaning. With piping, clients can be more specific and precise in their follow up questions, furthering their retargeting capabilities when creating new surveys and projects.
There are 2 Types of Piping:
Piping into Question Text
Piping into question text allows you to include, or ‘pipe in’ previous question answer options into a particular question or any kind.
For example, you could ask a single-select question:
What is your favorite color?
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Other
If the respondent chose green, you could “pipe in” the selected response to that follow-up question text:
Can you explain why {green} is your favorite color?
On the Suzy platform, you can only pipe from a single select multiple choice question into question text!
Piping into Answer Options (including grid rows and columns!)
Piping into answer options allows you to include, or ‘pipe in’ previous questions’ answer options into another question’s set of answer options.
For example, you could ask a multi-select question:
What types of devices do you use on a weekly basis?
Smartphone
Laptop
Ipad/tablet
Gaming system
Television
Radio
Other
If the respondent chose smartphone, television and gaming system you could “pipe in” the selected responses into the answers of a subsequent question:
What is your favorite device to use?
Smartphone
Laptop
Gaming system
On the Suzy platform, you can pipe from a previous multiple choice question’s answers (single or multiselect) into another multiple choice question’s answers, scale grid rows, or custom grid rows or columns. For a complete list of what you can pipe, check out our overview on piping!
Interested in running a project that utilizes piping? Check out our Step-By-Step Guide or Video Walk-Through to get started!