Two of the potent methods to collect information from people are to create polls and quizzes. They're generally—if designed correctly—easy to follow and don't take much time of the prospect. If you're looking for a solution to create polls and quizzes, there are both free and premium applications available in the market. Today, we're going to look at one of the excellent free options called—Google Forms. All you need is a Google account and you're good to go. Unless you need highly customized and advanced input controls for your polls and quizzes, Google Forms is your best bet among all the free solutions.
In this tutorial, we'll create both a poll and a quiz to help you get familiar with all the available options and features. Practice creating such demo polls and quizzes before creating an actual one.
Instead of testing these polls and quizzes by yourself, ask some of your friends or peers to test them on their desktops and mobile devices. This way, you'll get better feedback from the test users.
Creating a Poll Through Google Forms
Creating a poll through Google Forms is dead simple. If your questions are ready, you can make a poll in less than 15 minutes. Let's see how to go ahead with it.
First of all, head over to Google Forms and create a blank form for your poll. Make sure you're already logged in to your Google account.
Click the plus symbol—as shown above—to create a blank form. Instead of using a template, I'll suggest starting from scratch as it'll give you complete control over customization—right from the first step.
Start with adding a title and description to the form. It'll help all the participants to know what the poll is all about. A description is often ignored or skipped by the form creators. I strongly suggest adding a description as well.
If you want to get the maximum number of respondents for your poll, avoid making email collection—mandatory. Let the participants go anonymous while answering your poll.
To do that, click the Change settings option as shown in the image above.
Upon clicking this option, you'll be diverted to the Settings tab. Expand the Responses section on this tab, and select the Do not Collect option from the dropdown menu.
On the same Settings tab, within the Presentation section, turn off the option to restrict the participant to take part in the poll—only once.
And lastly, all the questions in the poll are generally mandatory. Therefore, go to the Default section and turn on the option to make answering every question—mandatory—by default.
Once all the necessary settings are done, it's time to add questions to the poll. For that, click the plus button and select the type of question you want to ask from the dropdown menu.
The most common question types often included in a poll are indicated by arrows in the image above. Feel free to experiment and see which type you should select for a specific question.
Once you've added all the questions to the poll, you can customize the color scheme (theme) as per your liking. It includes font customization, the addition of a header image, and customization of background and foreground color.
To share the poll with the participants, use the Send button to generate a link for the same. You can also pick its embed code to integrate it into your website.
If you want to save the response data, you must link your poll form with a Google Sheet. This way, you can use it either to do offline analysis or to export the information to an external platform.
To do so, go to the Responses tab and click the Link to Sheets option. Select the option for a new spreadsheet and click the Create button to complete the linking process.
Linking a spreadsheet is optional. If the data is not that important and you just want a quick analysis of the poll results, you can see the information about the same in the Responses tab in the form of charts.
So, that's how you can easily create polls through Google Forms. Before creating actual polls for real-world participants, create a few and test them with your friends to fine-tune the customizations and other settings.
Creating a Quiz Through Google Forms
Let's create a quiz through Google Forms. We'll skip the common steps involved in creating polls and quizzes and will focus only on what is different—when dealing with a quiz.
After creating a blank form and doing the necessary visual customization, head over to Settings and switch on the quiz activation option as shown in the image below.
Depending on your requirements, you can either release the grades to the participants then and there immediately after completion of the quiz, or you can collect the data and later share it with the participants, at your will. Accordingly, choose the correct option that applies in your case.
I'll recommend activating the point grading system. Customize and assign a custom point value for the questions. Similarly, other options like activation of display of correctly answered questions and missed questions can be exercised as well. Once again, it all depends on your requirements.
In most cases, you'll want to collect the email addresses of the participants when running a quiz. Make sure to activate this option. Similarly, you may not want the participants to submit multiple responses to the quiz. Turn on this option, if required.
The rest of the settings are more or less similar to the ones used in a poll form. But, you can customize and change them as well. Last but not least, do not forget to link your quiz to a Google Sheet to save all the data of the participants.
Conclusion
Creating polls and quizzes through Google Forms is not only easy, but it is also very convenient as it is tightly integrated with other Google services.
Do ample visual customizations of your poll and quiz. It'll help you give it a branded look. So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and create a poll or a quiz through Google Forms—right now!