Program to walk users through logical steps

September 17, 2009 5:47 PM

I need the hive's help badly on this. I'm trying to find a program to walk a user through logical steps based on their answers to questions along the way.

I guess the best way to describe it is: I need a program that will let me write a question for a user to answer and show two answer choices (with nothing on the screen but the question and answers). When the user clicks on an answer they are sent to the screen set up for that answer. Then that screen has another question with two answers. When the user clicks an answer they are sent to the next appropriate screen, and so on until their path ends.

Basically I think I'm trying to find a flowchart that the user steps through, where each screen is a question, and the user is sent to the next question depending on their answer to the previous one.

I don't want to use a regular flowchart because people tend to want to move/read/jump ahead without fully completing the step they're on. Of course I'd like a free one. Thanks all.

posted by atm to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Why not use regular HTML? Make it a website. Then your free program is any web browser.
posted by -harlequin- at 5:49 PM on September 17 [2 favorites]

Have you tried Hunch.com? Caterina Fake, who helped create Flickr, launched the site a couple months ago.

You can contribute your own decision trees / flow charts to the knowledge base. The relevant page of the faq is here.
posted by bpm140 at 5:57 PM on September 17

What you're describing does indeed sound exactly like web pages, with the questions as plain text and the answers as links to other pages.
posted by flabdablet at 6:22 PM on September 17

Survey Monkey will do this. (Not sure about Form Spring.) The technical term for what you want is "branching logic."
posted by DarlingBri at 6:30 PM on September 17 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the replies.

I can see I should've said I need it to be able to run while users are not connected to the internet. The suggestions appear (to my untrained brain) to be online only. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Is there an html template anywhere I could use for this? HTML could be used offline, right?
posted by atm at 7:21 PM on September 17

Well, you can do it really basic, djb style, without a template :

Simply create a file (say, start.html) in a directory, containing something like..

Do you like ponies?<br>
<a href="q1.html">Yes</a>
<a href="q2.html">No</a>

Which will turn into

Do you like ponies?
Yes
No

And then q1.html and q2.html, in the same directory, in the same way, and so on, and so forth. Then you only have to put a shortcut on the desktop (or wherever), and you're done.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:59 PM on September 17 [1 favorite]

Thanks Monday!

Just what I needed.
posted by atm at 8:15 PM on September 17

I've used Powerpoint to do something similar, embedding links from one slide to another, so clicking one "yes" would go to slide 2 for example and clicking on "no" would go to slide 3. I'm sure there are lots of better tools out there, but if you're already familiar with Powerpoint, it might be a quick and easy solution for you.
posted by platinum at 10:25 PM on September 17

Harlequin actually gave the correct answer first.
posted by w0mbat at 2:18 AM on September 18