Surveys are a great tool for including more stakeholders to contribute with data, without having to learn how to use Ardoq. This is especially powerful for gathering data from the Business side of your organization given that surveys look like any other form with explanatory text.

There are three major use cases for Surveys:

This article walks you through how to a create a survey from scratch. Here, you can also find a detailed explanation of the different features in each section of the Survey Builder.

To learn how to generate a survey, check out the "How to Automatically Create a Survey" KB article.

Table of Contents:

Click on "Surveys" from the home page and click on "New Survey" from the survey overview page. Alternatively, select the component and choose "Create from the selected component" from the Survey menu.

You will then see the Survey builder. Here you can give your survey a name, email address, and description.

Make sure you enable survey digest emails to receive updates about the survey submission.

Select the workspace and the component type you would like to build the survey for. A Survey can revolve around one component type and its associated relationship and field.

You can also choose if you want to allow respondents to delete components in the app and the components you created through surveys.

You can configure your survey by using "Advanced search option." Use this option to narrow down or filter the components by applying rules. You can see the filtered components under "Preview Selected Components".

In this example applications classified as Cloud will only be exposed in the survey. It is not currently possible to create an advanced search on a rule-based on references and the workaround is to create a calculated field based on reference and use it for filtering.

To get a better understanding of advanced search, please refer to this article.

Click on "Add question" to create questions for your survey based on field or reference. You can also add a text section here to display in the survey.

In the example below, a field question is created for the field "Description."

Set the field question as you see in the image above. This does not indicate that respondents need to answer the question, but if you would like to achieve that set the "is this field required" checked.

If you're creating a parent field question, be sure to utilize advanced search to narrow down the list of answer options to only those relevant to the parent component of the selected component.

You can also create a survey question for references. In the example below, a reference is created for the Application owner. The component type here for Person from the People workspace, and the direction of the reference is selected as Incoming and of type Owns.

The reference question is also required, and the minimum number of references is set to be 1. The application will therefore need at least one reference in the status field.

You can create a text or reference field question for a reference question by clicking on ‘Add a section to reference question’. The image below shows how a field question would look like for the reference question for the application owner.

Note: It is recommended to provide a good description for better quality answers to survey questions.

Make your surveys more interactive with links and text formatting that creates a more structured and engaging experience for survey respondents, ultimately improving submission rates.

When creating or editing survey questions, look for the rich text option above the text window. Simply click to access a range of formatting tools and add links, images, videos and apply more formatting seamlessly.

Click on the Result Display option to enable or disable the landing page so that respondents will only see existing entries. To add field columns to display in the survey, choose from the drop-down as in the image below.

The final tab of the survey is called Result Filtering. Result Filtering is an option that can be configured to give Survey contributors the ability to narrow down the list of components that they are seeing. For example, a Result Filter configured to the People workspace, on an ownership reference type, will let owners more easily find components that are relevant to them.

There are two types of filters you can apply:

This option lets you select which group of components to show based on which components they reference or are referenced by. This can be useful when component groups are defined by references, rather than the hierarchy.

In the following example, the result filtering is defined by which technology is referenced. For the survey taker, this will be shown as a navigator to the left of the screen, where it is possible to select a technology. Selecting a technology will show all the components which already exist and can be documented by the survey, which are connected to that technology:

Hierarchy filtering can come in handy when working with multi-layer component structures. It does not in any way limit what components are available for the survey takers to document, but adds a hierarchy navigator to the left of the survey. This makes it easier to show just the components which are relevant to the survey taker.

In the following example, we have a survey used to document what technologies the employees in different countries are familiar with. For example, you work in the United Kingdom and want to document which technologies your colleagues in that country are familiar with. Rather than having to scroll through the worldwide list of employees, you can simply click United Kingdom in the hierarchy navigator, and only components corresponding to employees in the United Kingdom will be shown:

Finally, remember to save changes and set the survey to Live. Next, assign a permission to your survey to define who can submit responses and share it with your stakeholders. Learn more about survey permissions in the section below.

Go back to the survey overview page, to view the status of your surveys:

Live - the "Live" toggle of the survey in the survey builder is on.

Draft - the "Live" toggle of the survey in the survey builder is off.

In Ardoq, you can use privileges to define feature access and permissions to define asset access. For instance, permission to access a particular survey.

For instance, you can enable the "Create Surveys" privilege to allow users to create surveys using the Survey Builder. On the other hand, permissions enable you to grant access to a given survey and define the actions your users can perform on that survey such editing or submitting answers to the survey only. Learn more about survey permissions in the section below.

Given that you are an admin user in the Ardoq app, you can allow users to create new surveys by enabling the “Create Surveys” privilege on their user role or individually per user.

To grant Surveys access to a specific user role:

Enabling the “Create Surveys” privilege on a user role is the easiest way to manage who can create surveys in your organization. Once the “Create Surveys” privilege is enabled on a user role, it is not possible to disable it on specific users who have that user role.

For example, if you enable the “Create Surveys” privilege on the Writer user role, all of your existing Writer users, and those you add in the future, will be able to create and edit surveys. Because the “Create Surveys” privilege is enabled on the Writer user role, you won’t be able to disable the “Create Surveys” privilege on single users who have the Writer user role assigned.

Enable the “Create Surveys” privilege individually per user when you need certain people to create new surveys and their user role does not allow them to.

To enable the “Create Surveys” privilege on single users:

Assign users a permission on a particular survey to grant them access and determine what actions they can do on that specific survey. It is not necessary to enable the "Create Surveys" privilege for them to access and edit the survey. The "Create Surveys" privilege only allows users to create new surveys.

To grant users a permission on a given survey:

The available permissions for Surveys are:

You can grant users the Administrator, Writing or Read-only permissions depending on their role:

FAQ: What is the difference between "all contributors" and "all organization members"?
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All organization members only include the roles of administrators, readers, and writers; contributors are not classified as members.

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👉 Learn more about privileges and permissions in the “Assign Users Access to Assets and Functionality” KB article.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or need help with creating the perfect Surveys for your organization.