How to create your online quiz: Practical tips for beginners

Making your first online quiz for business purposes? Looking to get a leg up and knock it out of the park? You’ve found the right article.

Whether it’s a marketing quiz to promote a product range, a fun quiz for your online publication to entertain your readership, part of an employee experience campaign (EX), or even a component of a larger gamification experience, such as an extended marketing activation or an interactive training course, we’ve got you covered.

This is practical, broadchurch advice for creating online quizzes.

Choose an “enterprise-grade” online quiz maker or platform

The online quiz maker or platform you use is going to define a lot of what’s possible with your quiz, both from a configuration standpoint, and from a design standpoint.

When choosing which online quiz maker or quiz platform to use, you want to go for something that’s “enterprise-grade.”

What on Earth does “enterprise-grade” mean? you may reasonably ask. It’s a bit of a nonsensical buzzword that was born out of so many tech solutions trying to stand out in the B2B market, and it gets some extrapolation to include words like “scalable,” and “robust,” but we’re going to go a step further, and iron out exactly what is needed by businesses in their online quiz platform.

At the very least, it needs to offer:

Customisation options to include your logo
Multiple question and answer formats to adapt to multiple projects
Full flexibility to insert intermediate screens to convey your messaging
A seamless editing and creation portal on the back-end
A comprehensive and intuitive data export function

And ideally:

White labelling options so you can completely own the branding

The Drimify games creation platform offers a high level of customisation on both fronts, featuring all of the above features and more. While we’ll be running through the rest of this article with the Drimify platform in mind, these approaches will be applicable to any other quiz platforms that meet our minimum requirements to be considered “enterprise-grade.”

Set the branding and appearance of your quiz

The branding of your quiz boils down to setting the following elements that are global features of the entire experience:

Background
Logo
Font style and colour
Button text and button colour

This is the backdrop, infrastructure, or foundation of your online quiz. Once these are in place, everything else will look 75% complete. You’re just adding your questions, copy, and media for illustration after this work is done.

On the Drimify platform, you have the option to include video or animated backgrounds to create more immersive user experiences. For example, for a Halloween-themed quiz, you could have a spooky, foggy backdrop, or for a fan engagement quiz based around your local football team, you could create an action video of this season’s highlights to set a positive tone.

Define your start and end screens

Once you’ve laid your foundation with your branding, you need to think about how to start off your experience, as this sets the tone for what’s to follow. At the same time, you also need to think about how it’s going to end – after all, how can you conduct a user journey to further business objectives if you don’t know the destination?

Make the right first impression with your start screen

You have the following components to define in your online quiz’s start screen:

Title
Media (typically an image)
Description
Start button

They key is to be on brand with the style of copy, and to be brief. If you can get all the information across in two short sentences, don’t bloat it up to three. (The more there is to read on the start screen, the more people will drop off and not engage with your app and start your quiz.)

If there was ever a time in your communications career to exercise the most extreme economy of expression, this is it. A quiz is a game. It’s supposed to be fun. Don’t overdo the writing side of it and make it feel like a philosophy exam.

Use your end screen to double down on your quiz’s goals

You have the following components to define for the end screen:

Title
Media (typically an image)
Description
Call to action button (CTA)

Typically, good practice is to thank participants for playing, or congratulate them on their performance, with a positive image and a description that reinforces your messaging. The CTA button is where you can use a link behind a custom label to send users to a strategic web page.

That CTA button is key for redirecting player attention towards the aim of your quiz, whether that’s to get them to sign up for an event, or direct them to a product page on your website to encourage sales.

Using your end screen to personalise your online quiz

On the Drimify platform, you also have a results section that you can customise. For example, participants scoring four out of four questions correct might get a “Great job!” a positive GIF, and a description bigging up their knowledge of whatever the subject is your quiz is concerned with.

Players who got zero questions correct could get a tongue in cheek message poking (friendly) fun at their result.

From these result profiles, you can give different participants different CTA buttons. If for example, you were testing how much your audience knew about a subject, you could then send them further reading materials more suitable to their level of knowledge.

Construct your questions

In many ways, this is the quiz. In the same way a house is its bricks, and a sports team is its players, if you don’t have questions, you don’t have a quiz.

The factors you need to consider when defining your questions are:

How many should I ask?
How difficult should they be?
What format should they be in?

To answer these, you need to draw them all back to knowing what the aim of your online quiz actually is and who your audience is. Why have you allocated a budget for an online quiz anyway? Is your quiz themed, or referencing a classic quiz show like Jeopardy! and if so, are you able to replicate their format? You also need to consider what you actually need to know from your audience.

Number of questions

If you actually want to test your audience, or create a sort of online contest, your quiz could be 5 questions long, or maybe even as long as 20 questions if you think about the Buzzfeed-style quizzes about pop-culture and sports.

If your goal is to whet their appetite about your product or event, and you just need to get them to that end screen in their most enthused/ informed state to click on your CTA button, two or three questions, possibly with an intermediate content screen is probably ideal.

Difficulty and format of your questions and answers

In addition to the flexibility of using text, video and audio in the construction of your questions, the Drimify online quiz maker gives you the following answer formats to choose from:

Single choice: Participants try to select one correct answer among multiple incorrect options.
Multiple choice: Participants try to select all the correct answers from multiple options.
Open: Participants can type their answers in their own words.

Single and multiple choice answers are far easier to quantify on the back-end for data collection, and they’re much easier from a user experience standpoint (they just have to click an option rather than think up their own response), although the open answer format can be ideal if you’re looking to also collect more extensive zero party data.

You should also consider your target audience when deciding how challenging to make your questions. If for example, you’re marketing for a sports team, and you have a highly engaged and knowledgeable fanbase, and you’re looking to use a leaderboard and create a bit of competition – challenge them.

Make it difficult. Your goal is to see separation in final scores and increased engagement through competition, so don’t be shy about laying down “The Ultimate MVF Quiz” or something similar.

If you’re trying to encourage discovery of your brand, and attract interest, simpler questions interspersed with informative intermediate screens will be more on the money. Similarly, that shorter, simpler approach would be in-keeping with a Christmas quiz aimed at your employees, where you’ll have a more general audience.

In short: Tailor the difficulty to your audience’s level of knowledge, and also their level of interest. A formal exam is a terrible way to start a relationship.

Final thoughts on building your first online quiz

A solid quiz builder that can be considered “enterprise-grade” like Drimify should make it easy to adjust and edit as you develop and test your online quiz.

Ultimately, success will largely come down to knowing why you’re making a quiz and what you want to achieve through it (email sign ups, web traffic on a specific site, conversions, etc.). Beyond that, following these principles and covering these key areas will help ensure your first attempt at a quiz is optimised towards this goal to a good level.

You also need to remember to promote it! Send your online quiz to all your contacts in your email marketing, create a dedicated quiz landing page, and display its QR code wherever your target audience is likely to see it.

Want to know more?