Survey Design 6: Overlays

Survey designers with Overlord or higher permissions can set overlay options on one or more questions, enabling survey administrators without advanced survey design experience or knowledge (those with Proctor, Data Proctor or Overseer permissions) to override and customize prompts, labels, responses and instructions. 

For example, if a survey designer created a survey to rate people on certain attributes, a generic set of attributes can be used for the initial version and the survey administrator can adjust the attributes to match their organization. The survey may have a question like “Rate the team on Grit” and the survey administrator could change it to “Rate the team on Toughness”.

The Overlay Process 

• Configuration … The survey designer designates which questions/items can be modified. 
  • When editing a survey with one or more overlay options enabled, people with permission sets of Overlord and above will be prompted to select ‘Overlay Designer’ or ‘Advanced Designer’ mode. (See below for differences between these modes.)
  • Note: If someone has made changes to override items within a survey, using the Advanced Designer may revert those properties. A warning message will be shown when editing an item with overrides modified.
• Administration … The survey administrator customizes the designated item(s), before making it available to people in the Instance. 
  • People with Proctor, Data Proctor or Overseer permission sets have access to survey design, but only Overlay Design mode. 

Overlay Designer vs. Advanced Designer modes

• Overlay Designer mode displays the survey in a kind of preview mode. There are no pages, and page breaks are shown similar to the PDF Export. Other differences:
  • There is a fixed header at the top of the page with buttons to navigate up/down to each overlay item.
  • You can toggle ‘Show Only Items to Review’, to streamline this part of the process.
  • When done editing, there are buttons for Preview, Publish and return (or exit; this does NOT cancel or undo changes). When Publishing, you’ll be prompted to Preview it, and have the option to schedule the survey, as well as set reminders.
  • Overlay changes are saved at the item level, though you can always revert each item to its original design. 
  • Sections have a header to describe who will be the target for the section (and an edit icon if it can be overridden).
  • There is no assessor or target selection. If there is a selection to be made, a Test Target will be used.
  • Questions that have no overlay settings are dimmed.
  • Icons indicate which items can be adjusted. If a question is hidden via overlay, an eye-slash icon will be displayed.
• Advanced Designer mode has no restrictions, so all options are available to add, edit and design.

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Version(s): GideonSoft 2023 Release 1 and later