Choosing a colour for hotspot regions | XM Community
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Hello,



I have hotspot questions set up as on/off with only two regions available, set up such that respondents must choose a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1.



I have named these regions 'Noswitch' and 'Switch'.



I have display logic in place that uses these responses in the next question (such that respondents only move to the next question if they chose Switch ('Switch - on is selected') and did not choose Noswitch 'Noswitch - on is not selected').



The reason I'm using hotspots rather than just radio buttons for this simple design is that the respondents are children. Hotspots are more engaging and also allow me to trust children to click in the right region, as they're large, rather than making a mistake on small radio buttons.



I have two questions:



- I don't want respondents to get the idea that one response is right and the other is wrong. Right now, one region is green and another is red. These imply right and wrong. Can I change the colour that the region turns when it is clicked?



- When I download response data, no matter in which format, there is no reference to what I named the regions. Instead I get 'on' or 'off' twice for each question (presumably to show me that the region on the left was 'on', that is, chosen, and the region on the right was 'off', i.e. not chosen). Why is this? Is there a way to simply get a spreadsheet that shows me whether respondents chose Switch or Noswitch for each question?
From my experience the red/green behavior is only present when Interactivity is set to Like/Dislike, where ‘Like’ is green with a check mark in the center of your region and ‘Dislike’ is red with an X in the center of the region. On Interactivity On/Off I have only seen green as the selected color. This behavior is also seen in the survey builder when setting up your Hot Spot question type. Check it out in Preview mode, and if you’re seeing something different let me know (and if you’re willing post your .qsf file and I can take a look).



To get the data in the format you want in your export can be tricky with the Hot Spot question type, but the way you have your survey set up with the validation set to the range of “minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1” I think you can pull this off using bucketing. In Data & Analysis:

* Go to Tools --> Create New Field

* Select Bucketing in the upper right corner

* For you Source Value select your hot spot switch question

* Rename ‘New Group 1’ to “Switched On”

* Drag “On” from your Source area to this group

* Rename ‘New Group 2’ to “Switched Off”

* Drag “Off” from your Source area to this group

* Click Create Variable



!



For the case you described this should give you what you’re looking for in your exported file.
Ah, you are right about the colour: when set to on/off and drawing the regions it's red/green, but when presenting them it's just green. Unfortunately this is still a bit of a hint to kids that their answer was 'right', so it would be great to have another colour choice, but I realise we are using this option for a purpose for which it wasn't exactly intended!



Your advice on the bucketing is great - this should work. Because of the colour problem we've had to use a different data collection method than Qualtrics, but we will no doubt come back to this method in other circumstances and will use this technique. Thanks.
@ruthjlee Which platform did you end up using? I have a similar problem.



Thanks,

Kinney
@Kinney_V, unfortunately in the end it was pen and paper! We also tried E-Prime - in fact, that was our first choice. However, we ran into technical problems. They should have been solvable, but I was new to E-Prime and we had little time. The problems were not directly related to the issue I described above, so E-Prime may be an option for you (or PsychoPy). Good luck!
@ruthjlee Ah! Alright, I appreciate the input and the PsychoPy suggestion. I don't know very much about that one, so I will look into it! E-prime isn't an option as one of our goals is to be able to distribute easily, as why we are trying to get away from the pen and paper option as well. I'm glad you found something that worked well. As a side note: I have requested that this functionality is added to the platform and am keeping an eye out for it. [insert optimism here] 🙂

Thanks again!

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