Optimising your interactive quiz’s question and answer formats

In this article we’re going to get stuck into the bricks and mortar of your interactive quiz for communications experiences – your questions and your answers.

We’re going to talk about:

• How you ask your questions
• The answer options you can give
• How to combine your approaches to deliver the best possible user experience in a way that contributes to your goals

This is really reading material for the advanced class on making your quiz work for you and your business goals.

Question and answer formats impact the user experience

Let’s consider the following scenarios:

1. A marketing quiz designed to promote products in a store, accessible by a QR code on people’s phones
2. A training quiz designed to assess an employees understanding on very important job-specific legislation they legally need to know
3. A language learning quiz aimed at tourists

Each has very different requirements from the formatting, both to engage the participants and make it a rewarding experience for them, and for the type of businesses that would create the quizzes in the first place to deliver return on investment (ROI).

Option one is a marketing quiz that will almost exclusively be played on a phone. Short, economical copy to minimise how much scrolling will be necessary to navigate the quiz, the use of images, video, and striking graphic design to make it visually compelling are essential.

It will also benefit from having a super simple answer format, such as single choice or multiple choice, as a more complex approach may be off-putting. Afterall, this is an experience they’ve started on a whim in a store – they’re not guaranteed anything from participating, nor do they need to complete it, so simplicity and ease of use should be key.

Option two involves real stakes, both for the quiz makers, and the quiz takers. Here, the design, while still needing to be premium, should be simpler in order to put the spotlight on the content and the important details. It may also be necessary to include a more complex answer format, such as open answers, to let participants put things in their own words, or to explain their working.

Option three could offer real benefits to the quiz takers to enhance their holiday. Here, it would be worth having video or audio questions, so they could listen to the language they’re learning being spoken by natives. It adds an element of realism and applicability to their experience.

Aligning questions and answers with business goals

Of course, for an interactive quiz to be productive, both sides need to win.

In the first example, with the marketing quiz, the participants need to be engaged or have the potential to be rewarded for them to get to the end.

But equally, the questions and answers, need to serve the business creating the quiz.

They need to highlight their products, or encourage participants to look at strategic areas of the store or packaging to find the answers.

In every case, when creating your interactive quiz, you need to consider your business objectives first. What do you want to know? What do you want people taking your quiz to see, learn, or do? Then figure out what’s in it for your audience, assess appropriate topics or categories, and build your quiz questions and answers accordingly.

These two needs: your needs as a business or organisation creating the quiz, and your audience’s, are the blueprints to building your questions and answers.

Exploring question formatting

Depending on exactly which interactive quiz builder you’re using will depend on the options available to you, but if it’s an enterprise-grade platform like Drimify, you will have the following options available to you:

• Images or GIFs: From a graphic design standpoint, an image will typically be the bare minimum to include to illustrate your question.
• Videos: This could be a video file that adheres to the recommended file requirements of the quiz builder, or with Drimify, you can also include a URL to where the video is hosted online (if applicable).
• Audio: Uploading just the audio file is also an option if you don’t want any accompanying visuals to the audio.

All of the above options are in addition to a title and description, where you can use text to ask your questions.

You’ve got enough versatility to suit the questions to the topics, whether they’re general knowledge, more trivia questions, or more specific categories like literature, movies, or pop culture.

For example:

• You could spice up literature trivia questions with GIFs or images from popular TV and movie adaptations
• Pop culture trivia questions like movies and TV benefit from video questions, as do football and sports quizzes, such as “What happened next?”-style questions
• Music quizzes or language quizzes are well served by video and audio files

Answer type options

On Drimify’s interactive quiz template, you have the following answer formats available:

• Single choice: This is where participants are presented with multiple answers, but only one of them is correct. This approach can be used to create a true or false or yes or no format by only having two answer options.
• Multiple choice: This is where participants are presented with multiple answers, and more than one of them are correct, and to answer correctly, they need to select all the applicable answers.
• Open: This is where you can invite participants to answer in their own words.
• NPS: This stands for “Net Promoter Score,” and on Drimify’s quiz template you can set this to 0-3, 0-5, or 0-10 ratings. You can also define if this appears as numbers or emojis. This isn’t a right or wrong answer, so much as a survey-style question that exists within your quiz. This could be for feedback on a product, a brand, a service, or even on the quiz itself.

With multiple and single choice questions, you can also upload images or GIFs to them to illustrate the answer.

There’s enough versatility in these formats to create almost any style of quiz, even if you wanted to replicate a popular TV game show like Jeopardy! or something similar with pull for your demographic.

Matching the answer formats to your goals and the scale of your project

The NPS format and the open format don’t have an instantly valid score. This means that, for example, if you’ve built a test or a trivia quiz and included open questions, these won’t have an impact on the automated results and the end screens.

If you’re looking to really pay attention to what people put in an open answer, you need to budget the time to go through them. This means being able to forecast how many participants you’re expecting.

It’s also important to assess if it’s really necessary to include these.

If single choice or multiple choice will suffice, this will likely save you a lot of work.

Best practices for combining question and answer types

This is grammatical and visual, and will be influenced by what the expected device type is that people will be playing your quiz on.

You always, wherever possible, will want to limit the length of the game, and make it as easy a user experience as possible.

With this in mind, it’s nearly always going to be recommended that you illustrate either the question, OR the answer, but very seldom both.

It’s typically going to be just too busy, with the exception being if the answers are illustrated with very simple icons.

In terms of the copy of the questions and the answers, you want to really go hard on simplicity. There’s nothing worse than taking part in a quiz, but feeling like they’re trying to get you with trick answers, or answers that are so sloppily constructed that they’re confusing to read.

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