Test Drive of Survey Tools — Our Experience With Google Forms, Survey Planet and Typeform
Choose Yes or No; please rate from 1 to 5; how likely are you… Sounds familiar, right?
Marketing specialists are quite used to conveying all sorts of client surveys. Long and short, quantitative and qualitative, online and in-app, test and interview. Obviously, there are many survey techniques, tools, and practices.
For example, a personal interview is commonly considered the most informative type of survey. It’s also advised that you conduct at least 35+ interviews to be able to spot regular patterns, group the data, and make correct conclusions.
Alas, in reality new clients and initial beta users are rarely eager to get in touch with you personally, especially during the first few weeks with your product.
This is exactly the kind of situation that we faced when having conducted a focus-group survey for our Roadmap Planner and a closed beta for our newest KeepSolid Sign. So, despite all the benefits of a personal interview for a user, such as time saved and opportunity to ask questions about the product directly, you are in danger of not getting any feedback whatsoever.
That is why we will compare three instruments for getting a high-quality feedback via surveys specifically. This is a comparative analysis we did for in-house needs and decided to publish here to have a link to refer to =)
The results of any survey greatly depend on the instrument that you use. It affects the user experience, your reputation, and the overall success of the survey.
Please note that this is not a review of these tools, but rather a subjective rating of how well they helped us to achieve our goals.
These are the goals we had:
- Make 3 relatively long interviews (20+ questions) fun, fast to complete, convenient to navigate and use on both mobile and desktop, with built-in tool tips and clarifications
- Use various types of questions — free-answer, scoring, rating (with a clear scale)
- Survey results should be presented with unambiguous visuals — graphs, diagrams, etc. Also important is the ability to group results by criteria like email or country and share the separate groups with the team
- It was crucial to have survey interactions statistics — completion rate, average time, devices, etc.
- The survey should be branded with corporate colors and fonts to look professional and credible
Overall, we both wanted to get a high-quality feedback and make the survey comfortable and fun for users, since we’re planning to continue interviewing them in the future. I.e, result-oriented + user-friendly. The tools tested were:
- Google Forms (because it’s free)
- Survey Planet (because we’d previously used it and had an account there)
- Typeform (because it has lots of features and we ourselves enjoyed completing tests created with it before)
Just for the record, none of the services won over all the goals. They are all essentially different and were created for different tasks.
However, they can all be used for conducting surveys, the only question is how effectively? That’s what we’ll try to answer here. For your convenience, we’ve separated our wishes into the list and rated them 0, 0.5, or 1.
Here’s what we got, divided by types:
In this part, we’ve excluded “help text for questions”, “pics and other creative materials to support the question or actually be the question”, and “survey progress bar”. This is because all of the three services had these features.
In this section, once again, we have excluded a couple of features. “Visualizing survey results as graphs, diagrams, etc.” — because all services provide this ability.
“Grouping data by criteria like email or country” and “Creating various fields depending on user’s answers” — because none of the services have those features.
In these parts, the excluded options are two for the branding, since all of the instruments provided them — “Logo and other pictures” and “Choosing interface language”.
As you can see, Typeform emerged as a winner. It suited our goals the best, and even more — its ability to send follow-up emails automatically proved extremely useful. Previously, we had to send all confirmations and informational emails manually.
We didn’t cover obvious features like the ability to download data as .csv format, or to set the question branching depending on the answers — every service must have them. Also, for our goals we didn’t need some of the otherwise useful features such as integrating the survey into a website or working with templates. Another thing we didn’t compare was pricing, since these services are so different and each one obviously needs its own type of monetization. If you need to conduct surveys routinely, paying for a convenient service is certainly a worthy investment.
Conclusion
If you have an occasional need to conduct more or less customizable surveys for free, choose Google Forms. It has its share of useful features, but such survey won’t look anywhere professionally. You can always integrate it into your website, but it will hardly suit your design.
If you need quick, short surveys and an ability to review the results as a graph, use Survey Planet. Unfortunately, it provides minimal branding options, so you will not make the survey look corporate and credible.
If you need to conduct long, interactive surveys, establish a dialogue with users, add various effects and logical blocks, and brand it to look like a landing page, we recommend Typeform. However, it has its own drawback — figuring out and utilizing all of its features will take you quite some time.
Which of the following surveys would you prefer to complete?
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