Create 2026-07-30-multiple-branches-feedback-sessions.md

research/2026-07-30-multiple-branches-feedback-sessions.md

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+# Feedback on real usage of the new branching feature
+
+## 2026-07-30 / Sprint 1 (Q2)
+
+## Aims
+- To find out whether there are any unpredicted challenges that arise when people use the feature on real forms.
+
+## Participants
+- Form creators
+- Central and local government users
+- 5 organisations
+- 8 participants
+
+## Methodology
+- We gave participating organisations access to the feature via a feature flag.
+- They used it for 2 weeks on their own forms.
+- We then held 45 minute interviews about their experience.
+
+## Key Headlines 
+
+Generally, participants found the new way of adding routing straightforward, clear, and intuitive.
+
+### New issues
+**Identifying questions and branches**
+- 3 participants raised the issue of struggling to identify which question to route to when using the same question within different branches.
+
+**Understanding how many list options they could route from**
+- 1 participating team found it challenging to work out how many list options they could have multiple routes from. They had to try it out, adding more options until they couldn’t add routes any more. They said it was the content that was confusing.
+
+**Error messages could be overwhelming**
+- 1 participant tried out moving a question during the session and got the “backwards route” error. They said seeing lots of messages like that was “scary” - even though they understood why it was like that.
+
+### Reinforcing what we’ve seen/heard before
+
+**Setting up the question incorrectly**
+- 2 participants told us about setting up the question as the wrong type.
+- One of those (a very experienced user) selected “one or more” options for their list.
+
+**Add and edit questions page - routing descriptions**
+- 2 participants got  pretty confused during the session about whether they had done their routing correctly (they both actually had).
+
+**Challenge with longer page**
+2 participants anticipated it would become more difficult with a longer form - especially when changing the order of questions and routes
+
+### General
+
+**Doesn’t meet all their needs**
+- For most, this is a helpful iteration and will enable them to create more forms or improve existing ones
+- For some, there are further needs it still does not meet, such as:
+  - Routing from checkboxes
+  - Conditional questions that appear later in the form to certain respondents (i.e. not a direct branch)
+
+### Things not related to branching
+
+**Issues with saving the questions**
+- 2 participants told us about challenges they had with not saving their questions and losing them - this had happened to them multiple times.
+
+**Adding lists in the text box (long lists)**
+- It was difficult to parse the list items separately [dyslexic user]
+
+## Supporting Evidence
+- [Report](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iuDeQKsczwgCihHnllMyWm-ABZ-fou2a9ov_-oh0ZJs/edit?pli=1&tab=t.w3xt1rh9j1zi)
+- [Further documentation](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K0eI3Qwd5DR0jqLnhiuP5OQYUlWR9zIb)