Online Quiz Platforms
Are you an Idea Monkey or a Ringleader?
That’s the question Maddock Douglas, a strategy and innovation company, is asking human resource and management experts, and you! We helped Maddock Douglas develop a fun online quiz called “Free the Idea Monkey” that helps professionals discover where their leadership and innovation strengths lie. We researched a variety of off-the-shelf quiz software and are sharing our list of some of the best available options. Our research results may surprise you. Sometimes “old-school” beats “new-school”, depending on requirements and budget. If you think we’ve missed something, please comment below.
We started building the “Idea Monkey” quiz on Wildfire’s platform. That’s because we’ve used the platform for two past contests and were pleased with its performance and usability. Online support is available and you can either pay as you go or request a quote for custom features. But as we got further into development, we realized we didn’t have as much freedom as we wanted. Facebook isn’t an important piece in this quiz, and Wildfire excels at Facebook integration. We also couldn’t add all the sharing functionality we wanted to the quiz results landing page. While Wildfire is ideal if you’re looking to host a quiz exclusively on Facebook, we needed more flexibility and fewer Facebook bells and whistles this time around.
After we realized Wildfire couldn’t fulfill all of our needs, we turned to Fluid Surveys. With Fluid Surveys, you can theme your quiz and maintain complete control over your style sheets (that’s what you use to design your website.) It’s tablet and mobile friendly and you can also customize a quiz in different languages. It certainly had the functionality we needed but the price for the most flexible enterprise version was over budget for this project. So, we continued our search.
iSpring is a flash-based quiz builder. You should know that we didn’t actually kick the tires on this software, but it appears that you can incorporate audio, video, and custom images. The software looks a little complicated and there may be restrictions on branding and customization. It’s currently listed at $199 and comes with available online support. Online support is a perk, particularly if you’re keen on customization.
Tabletquiz is an option if you’re looking to build an app, exclusively and separate from any quiz software that you might embed in your website template. Again, this wasn’t exactly what we were looking for, but it’s good to know it’s out there in case we’re interested in building an app for the iPad.
Do-It-Yourself (In other words, get a developer to build exactly what you want.)
In the end, we went old school with Javascript and php. The “Idea Monkey” quiz logic uses Javascript plus some php to make each question in the quiz mandatory. It calculates the results and directs users to the appropriate results page. (We apologize for the developer talk. At least you’ll know how to “talk shop” with a developer if you go this route.) The code was dropped into a CMS page template, and design work was done to make it look good. Using “Add This” on the results pages made sharing quiz results on social media channels flexible and robust, which was a “must-have”.
Bonus: For Teachers in Search of Online Quiz Software
Along the way, we came across examples of quiz software for teachers. While these online tools didn’t fit what we were looking for, we thought they were fine examples of how teachers and instructors can utilize online tools to better manage their tests and classrooms. Tophatmonocle.com and classpager.com are both worth a look if you’re in need of this type of online functionality.