This is the Wonder Tools newsletter—useful tools & creative resources. I’m Jeremy Caplan, a journalist & director of teaching & learning at CUNY’s Newmark J-School.
Typeform is my favorite tool for creating surveys. ✨
Feedback is a gift. But we don’t get — or give it— often enough. That’s because it’s often done with clunky forms. Filling them out can be a nuisance.
Typeform lets you create surveys that actually look cool and feel fun to fill out. You can use them to gather feedback or ideas. Or for RSVPs, event registrations or applications.
You can even use Typeform for simple FAQs like this or quizzes or trivia games, like this. Last year my family even created this postcard project with Typeform.
Google Forms are functional, free and easy to use. So they’re fine. 👩🏾💻
But surveys are a reflection of your brand, your personality, and your style. So why not make them look a little nicer? While also increasing the likelihood people will stick around to answer your questions thoughtfully?
Typeform surveys look and work great on mobile devices and in email.
Try something fresh + feedback 🎈
Want to sample a radically different survey approach? Take this Typeform bot-style survey. It’s dual purpose: you get a sense of a new experimental Typeform approach, and I benefit from your feedback on this newsletter.
Or take this version of the feedback survey about Wonder Tools to get a taste of the more traditional Typeform user experience. Whichever version of the 3-minute survey you take, your input will help me improve future newsletter posts.
Three great Typeform features 🌟
🏃♀️Logic jump. Rather than having everyone fill out questions that don’t apply to them, use logic jumps to get the right questions to the right people. This is useful if you’re surveying a group with diverse interests or needs.
If you’re surveying journalism colleagues, you can ask what department they’re in first, before querying them about what they most need to work effectively from home. That allows you to sort data later by department, and also allows you to tailor follow-up questions for each department.
If you’re surveying teachers you can first ask if they teach elementary, secondary or higher-ed students. Then you can ask questions tailored to their particular area of focus. That way each respondent only sees relevant questions, and you can dig deeper into people’s areas of interest without forcing others to answer irrelevant questions.
🤖 Bot surveys. Typeform recently added a terrific feature called Conversations. Convert any survey you create into a bot dialogue embedded into your site, or at a designated link. No coding required. Respondents who navigate to your "conversation" have a chat conversation with a bot that asks the same questions in your survey. Unlike a laundry list of questions, it has the visual feel of an informal chat. Here’s my feedback survey example.
📹Video questions. A new service from Typeform called Video Ask lets you pose short video questions. People can reply with a short video, or audio or text. Whatever they prefer. Here’s an example of a question I posed about laughter you can answer to try it out.
Do these 👇 four things to make surveys less painful
Ask fewer questions. Research shows that for each question you add, a smaller percentage of recipients respond.
Make your survey look nice. That’s where Typeform helps. It spruces up surveys so they’re visually appealing. It also compiles results into slick reports that are easy to digest and share. Typeform has a great mode for presenting results.
Mix up your questions. Typeform allows you to ask many different kinds of questions, from ratings and multiple choice to open text. And it includes a great array of visuals so you can add images, gifs or even short videos to your surveys. This quick trivia quiz made with a Typeform template has visuals to illustrate how they can add flair.
Tell people why to bother. Filling out a survey can also feel pointless if you're not sure how— or even if— the information will actually be used. So one thing to include in any survey you send out is a clear indication of why you’re surveying and how you’ll use the responses. If people are confident you’ll actually read and act on the survey results, they may give you a few minutes of their time.
Do you have a favorite survey tactic or trick? Hit reply or comment below to share it. Thanks for reading all the way to the 🔚 and have a great Thursday.