Introduction to Sequence Flow¶

Ask five people to rank five onboarding steps in the order they'd want to see them, and a normal ranking question will get you an answer - but only by asking every respondent to hold the whole list in their head at once and drag all five into place before they can submit anything. Stretch that list to ten or twelve items, or give it real dependencies between steps, and the same drag-list starts working against you: everything is visible at once, one drag can bump three other items out of position without meaning to, and a respondent who's only confident about their first pick and their last has no way to say just that without also committing to an opinion about everything in between.

Sequence Flow is built for that specific job: hand respondents a pool of items and let them build their own ordered sequence one placement at a time, instead of asking them to arrange an entire list in one motion.

What It Actually Is¶

Sequence Flow is the third section type available inside an Advanced Survey, alongside the Stimulus Section (directed feedback on specific parts of an image or video) and Pairwise Comparison (a head-to-head knockout between images). Where those two are built around a visual, Sequence Flow is built around order - plain text items, no image required - arranged into a sequence.

The building experience itself is a fixed set of slots, one per position in the final sequence, all visible from the start. A respondent taps any slot, picks an item from whatever's left in the pool, and watches it land in place. Nothing forces them to work front-to-back, and placing or moving one item never reshuffles anything else already placed - each slot only ever changes when the respondent taps it directly.

Full Sequences, or Just the Top of One¶

Not every sequence question needs a full ranking. Sequence Flow supports both:

• Full sequence - every item has to be placed before the respondent can finish. The right choice when you're asking about a genuine end-to-end order - a workflow, a process, a set of steps that all matter.
• Just the top few - you decide, at setup, how much of the sequence a respondent actually has to place. Useful when what you care about is which handful of items rise to the top, not a fully ranked opinion on every single one - asking someone to fully rank fifteen candidate features when you only care about their top three just adds fatigue without adding signal.

Not Just Task Steps¶

"Sequence" covers more ground than literal task instructions. Teams use it for onboarding and workflow ordering, feature or benefit prioritization, information-architecture and navigation-menu structure, and customer-journey step preference - anywhere the thing you're actually asking about is order, not just which individual item wins.

It's a different tool from a plain Ranking question (still available, and still the better fit for a short list a respondent can reasonably drag into place in one go) and from MaxDiff (which forces best/worst trade-offs across a larger list but doesn't produce a sequence at all - covered in our MaxDiff and TURF guide). Reach for Sequence Flow specifically when the list is long enough, or the ordering decision consequential enough, that building it one placement at a time beats dragging the whole thing at once.

How Results Come Back¶

Under the hood, a completed Sequence Flow submits as an ordinary ranking-style answer, so it shows up in your survey's normal Report tab like everything else - no separate dashboard to learn. What's different is how it's read: rather than averaging each item's position independently across every respondent (which throws away the thing you actually asked for - the order itself), Sequence Flow analyzes item-to-item transitions and gives you two dedicated views. Route Flow shows the single sequence that best represents the group, with a per-step reading of how much the group actually agreed on that particular placement. Route Network shows the full map of orderings people actually built, with that consensus route highlighted inside it. Our companion guide, Reading Sequence Flow Results, walks through both in depth.

The Basic Workflow¶

A Sequence Flow section is added the same way any other Advanced Survey section is - build it inside an Advanced Survey, preview it, publish it, and share the resulting link. Results land in the same Report tab you'd check for any survey, ready to filter and export, so nothing about reading the results requires learning a separate system once the test is live.

FAQ¶

Is Sequence Flow just a Ranking question with extra steps?
Related, not identical. A plain Ranking question is a single drag-and-drop list - fine for a handful of items. Sequence Flow builds the same kind of ordered result one placement at a time instead of one drag operation, which matters once a list gets long or the order genuinely matters to get right, and it comes with its own consensus-based way of reading results (see Reading Sequence Flow Results).

Do respondents have to place every item?
Only if you set it up that way. You can require a full sequence, or cap it so respondents only need to place their top few - see Full Sequences, or Just the Top of One above.

Can I combine a Sequence Flow section with Stimulus or Pairwise Comparison sections?
Yes - all three section types can live inside the same Advanced Survey, in whatever order fits what you're trying to learn.

How many items can a Sequence Flow section include?
Up to 20 items, each up to 300 characters.

Ready to see the order they'd actually pick? Start an Advanced Survey on Opionate and add your first Sequence Flow section.