Research · UX
Conditional Questions
Branching intake forms that people who aren’t engineers can set up themselves — so each submitter only sees the questions that apply to them.
- Role
- Sole designer, research to final design
- Where
- Levelpath intake forms
- Starting point
- No conditional logic existed
- Result
- Shipped as a new capability
01 / 06 · Levelpath · intake forms
Most of the form was irrelevant to most people
Levelpath is a procurement platform, and much of it runs on forms — intake requests, vendor onboarding, approvals.
Customers had built huge intake forms to capture everything they might ever need. Someone filing a simple request still had to wade through all of it, and a routine task felt like a compliance exercise.
There was no conditional logic in the product. Questions appeared or they didn’t.
Before
After
Every question, for every submitter.
Only the questions their answers call for.
02 / 06 · The insight
The pattern that fit came from outside the category
I was the only designer on it, working from customer stories about exactly where their forms broke down. Most form builders handle branching one field at a time: this answer shows that field. That falls apart when one answer should open a whole set of follow-ups.
Years earlier I’d worked on a platform for building tests, which grouped questions into banks that appear together. That idea transferred.
Not one field triggering another. One answer opening a group of questions.
03 / 06 · The solution
Logic, set up by someone who isn’t an engineer
A form builder picks a question, picks an answer, and attaches a bank of follow-up questions to it. Give that answer and the bank appears; give any other and it stays hidden.
Setting it up works like the rest of the form builder, and builders can see exactly what each answer will show — without working the logic out in their heads.
The person setting it up isn’t technical. The form still has to work.
Question
Answer
Bank
04 / 06 · Two models
Why banks, not fields
Explored
Field-level conditions
Each question decides whether it appears based on earlier fields. More precise — but real procurement forms don’t branch one field at a time.
Shipped
Question banks
One answer opens a whole group of follow-ups. It matched how form builders already thought about their forms, and the stories customers had told us.
05 / 06 · Outcome
Forms that adapt to the person filling them out
Conditional questions shipped as a new capability. Customers had described this exact problem in research, and they were relieved to finally give submitters shorter, focused forms.
In procurement, where speed and clarity matter, cutting questions nobody needed to answer isn’t a small thing.
06 / 06 · What I’d do differently
The structure was right. The tooling around it could go further.
01
Reusable banks
Banks you define once and reuse across forms didn’t make the first version. As companies standardise their intake, that would save a lot of repeated work.
02
Seeing the whole tree
With several branches, it gets hard to picture what each submitter will see. A map of the branches, rather than a list, would make complex forms easier to build and maintain.