It can be said that at one end of the design continuum of web surveys are form-based designs that present questionnaires as one long form in a scrollable window; at the other end are screen-by-screen questionnaires that present only a single item at a time. The automatic forwarding is a web survey function that leads a respondent immediately forward after answering. As a function it becomes close of the isolating procedure of single items. The automatic forwarding is rarely used but adopted in the web survey ZEF.
The ZEF shares the single questions into the separate files. The respondent is able to achieve the items of single file by clicking the file icon. After that the list of questions that the file include, become visible. The respondent is then able to perceive only the options for the one single question at the time, when the options for other questions in the file remain hidden. When answering, the automatic forwarding occurs as an immediate hiding of answer as soon as a radio button has been checked.
The procedure of automatic forwarding in ZEF leads to the lack of conventionally presented visual cues during answering process. It seems to removes the visual feedback and might be causes the loss of context. If a respondent makes a mistake - either because of misreading or because of problems with the mouse or the touch screen - it cannot be corrected. On the other hand, the benefits of individually presented questions on self- administrated questionnaires have been proved in many studies. The response times are longer for questions presented individually than for questions presented as a set. Answering the former takes more time, because the respondent must establish a cognitive orientation for each question separately. Clearly, the respondent must expend more cognitive effort to interpret individually presented questions. When trying to understand the possible consequences of automatic forwarding, the perspective of individually presented questions as well as the perspective of grouping questions should be taken account. Still, many questions remain open in automatic forwarding issue.