Build a short survey whose responses arrive in your inbox and spreadsheet

Questions that get honest answers

Most bad surveys fail before anyone answers, in the wording. A few habits from survey design make a large difference:

• One thing per question. "How fast and friendly was our service?" asks two things; a slow but friendly visit has no right answer.
• Neutral wording. "How much did you enjoy the workshop?" assumes they did. "How would you rate the workshop?" doesn't.
• Balanced scales. As many negative options as positive, with a clear middle, and labels on every point rather than just the ends.
• An escape hatch. "Not applicable" or "Don't know" stops people inventing an opinion to get past a required question.
• Specific time frames. "In the last month" beats "usually"; people remember recent events more accurately.
• Open questions last and few. One or two free-text boxes at the end, such as "What one thing should we change?", give more than ten at the start.

Keep it short

Every extra question costs completions. For customer feedback after a purchase or a visit, five to eight questions is plenty. Put the question you most need answered first, show progress ("Question 3 of 6") and say up front how long it takes. One question per screen works well on phones; a single scrolling page suits laptops and lets people review before sending.

How responses reach you

An Anticode app has no network of its own. The one way it sends anything out is the owner's form pipeline: the survey sends each completed response as a contact submission. You get it by email and in the Anticode dashboard, where submissions are stored sealed at rest. From there, connectors can pass each response on as it arrives:

Google Sheets

One row per response, through an Apps Script web app. The practical choice for analysing answers in a spreadsheet.

Airtable or Notion

A table or database you can filter and sort.

Slack, Discord or Telegram

A message per response, useful for seeing feedback in real time.

Any webhook

For your own system or an automation tool.

Each response is sent to a connector once, without retries, so check the connection with a test response before you share the survey. Free sites keep a monthly allowance of visible submissions (100 by default), with the rest held until you upgrade, which matters if you're surveying a large list; see pricing. The form submissions to Google Sheets guide covers that set-up.

Building it with Anticode

When you use Anticode as a survey maker, write out your questions and answer options in the request, plus the order and any skip rules: "A six-question feedback survey for a pottery class. Q1: rate the class 1 to 5 with labels. Q2: which session (list). Q3: if their score was 1 or 2, ask what went wrong; otherwise skip. Q4 and Q5 multiple choice. Q6 open text. One question per screen, a progress bar, and a thank-you screen." Simple skip logic like Q3 runs in the page.

Contact submissions need a name, an email address and a message, with any other answers added to the message. So each response carries the details the person enters. Ask for the answers to be laid out one per line in the message, so they're easy to read and to split into columns.

What a dedicated survey tool does that this doesn't

• No response charts or summaries. You get each response individually; totals and charts happen in your spreadsheet.
• No anonymous-by-design surveys. Responses go through the contact form, which asks for a name and an email address. People could type anything, but you can't promise anonymity in a way that's built into the form, and you shouldn't claim to.
• No branching analytics, quotas or panels. No drop-off reports, no limiting responses per segment, no recruiting respondents.
• No one-response-per-person control. Nothing stops someone answering twice.
• No partial responses. Answers are sent only when the survey is completed.

For anything sensitive (staff wellbeing, health, research with consent requirements), use a survey platform that offers proper anonymity and data controls. For a short customer or event feedback form that lands in your own spreadsheet, this works well. For scored questions with a result at the end, see the self-assessment tool or the lead generation quiz.

Questions people ask

Can I see the results as a chart?

Not in Anticode. Send responses to Google Sheets or Airtable and build the chart there.

Can I export all responses?

Submissions are listed in the dashboard, and a connector sends each new one to your spreadsheet as it arrives. Reads, exports and deletes of form data appear in an access log.

Does the survey need a privacy notice?

If you collect names and emails, yes. Anticode writes a starting privacy policy for each site from what it actually collects; check it fits your situation.