Hello team CB, would it be possible to implement a feature across both Clause9 and ClauseBuddy that indicates how many questions are captured under each card in a questionnaire for end-users to complete, and how long it is estimated for the questionnaire to be fully completed? A feature like this would be great from a user experience perspective, when end-users go in to complete a Q&A they can see how many questions they need to get through and how long in their day it might roughly take for them to prepare a draft, it is especially useful when there are many cards to go through. Many thanks for your consideration in advance.
Can you explain a bit more what exactly you are looking for that cannot be achieved by adding a comment or warning question (e.g., as one of the very first questions)?
The reason I’m asking, is that we have a very wide audience of end-users, so it will be difficult to predict how much time it will take to complete a questionnaire.
- Some questionnaires are very straightforward, with some simple administrative questions to be answered.
- In other questionnaires, lawyers will have to think quite intensely about which of the legal options they want to choose for the particular file they’re working on.
- In some questionnaires, lawyers can skip 80% of the questions because they are mere secondary “refinements”, while in other questionnaires even the non-mandatory questions should be thought about whether or not the default answer needs to be changed.
And so on…
Hi Maarten, thanks for coming back on that request.
You bring up a good point regarding capturing the time it would take for a user would take to complete the questionnaire. On the other hand though, do you think it would be possible to capture how many questions there are in a card (which would include conditional questions) as well as how many there would be in a card category?
In a long document there could be many card categories, and for the purposes of explaining this request, let’s look at an example where we have 3 card categories for document X; Card Category A, Card Category B, and Card Category C.
Looking at Card Category A there are 20 questions in total within which there are 3 cards. Under card 1 you have 3 mandatory questions with 2 conditional questions (5 questions in total), under card 2 you have 5 mandatory questions with 5 conditional questions (10 questions in total) and under card 3 you have 2 mandatory questions and 3 conditional questions (5 questions in total).
So when the user goes to fill-out the Q&A, they can see that for Card Category A they have a maximum of 20 questions to answer, and similarly Card Category B has a maximum 30 questions to answer, and Card Category C has a maximum of 5 questions to answer. Of course, they can always go through each Card Category to look at the nature of the questions (where there might be 30 questions to answer under Card Category B but these require quick and simple answers vs under Card Category C the 5 questions are much more complex in nature and require a bit more time to assess the responses), however the number of questions might perhaps assist them in some way as well in gauging how much time they might take to complete that portion of the Q&A. They of course also can save the answer set down and come back to complete the remaining unanswered ones at a later stage.
I’m still wondering whether it’s a good idea to create a standard timing feature, because the dynamic nature of the questions/cards creates a huge distribution of possibilities. Some problems I see with defining a standard metric:
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I personally hate it to fill in a survey/form that only promises to take 3 minutes, but when you then say “yes” to one of the suboptions, you suddenly get a whole avalanche of new questions to answer that take you more than 10 minutes. A well-intended “3 minutes” indication can therefore significantly backfire from the perception of the user.
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Then there’s the issue that some yes/no questions take you half a second to respond to, while some really require you to think deeply and/or look up some information elsewhere. How do we fit this into a standard calculation?
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How to deal with preselected answers? We strongly recommend template authors to preselect answers whenever possible, even if it feels awkward (from a legal point of view) to pre-answer on behalf of your users. Do you still count time for these preselected answers? How much?
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We would probably need to include some multiplication factor, so that template authors can indicate that the standard timing is too low for their intended audience.
All together, I think it’s getting very complicated to offer this as a standard feature. To me, this feels as one of these features that are very difficult to standardize, because — as we’ve learned after witnessing authors create Q&As — there is no “standard”, although most authors assumes that their particular situation happens to be so common that it probably applies to everyone.
If you feel that despite these objections it is useful for certain Q&As to get a standard timing, then I would be inclined to simply include this timing in the Q&A title, or perhaps in the first card? For example:
And if you really want to do an automatic calculation, you can use a “custom block” question:
Or perhaps even fancier, where you only include the currently enabled questions in your Q&A (this makes the timer interactively go/up down!)
Thank you for the prompt detailed answer, Maarten! I definitely agree that it would be quite challenging to capture the timing. My response above was focusing on providing the number of questions in a card/card category. Would it be possible to consider that feature instead?
We just had an discussion about this with out internal product team, and we are not yet convinced, primarily because the Q&As that are created by most of our users are quite dynamic, so that any indication of the number of questions would easily be misleading.
(However, this position is not fixed, so if other customers would feel differently, please let us know.)
No worries, Maarten. Thank you for the consideration and for having had a discussion with your internal team on this as well. Please do keep me updated if the position changes in the future!