How to make a quiz online: Examples, tips, and best practices

Online quizzes are a fantastic way of educating your audience, testing people’s knowledge, conducting market research, and even just having fun. As a highly flexible format with varying question types, you can make an online quiz that fulfills any role you need.

But to ensure a high competition rate and get the data you need, your quiz should be engaging. Let’s explore how to make a quiz online, touching on 10 steps to success.

Thanks to the range of tools we have at our disposal, making a quiz online is easier than ever before. However, even if making and distributing the quiz is easy, that doesn’t mean writing the content will be a breeze.

When planning your content, outlining the quiz's objectives, and determining what data you want to collect, there are many moving parts to consider. To simplify the process of making a quiz online, follow these ten steps.

The first step toward creating a quiz is to decide what you want to measure or learn from it. Are you creating a quiz to test your employees’ knowledge or an engaging trivia game for your customers? 

Understanding what you want the outcome of your quiz to be will help determine your objectives and the structure of your quiz. Here are a few learning objectives and goals a quiz creator might have:

Clear objectives give you the foundation to accurately determine which type of quiz and what sort of questions will work best.

After setting your objectives, it’s time to outline the content that you will use in the quiz. First of all, you should select a general topic. The topic will help you think of related questions to populate your quiz. 

Secondly, you should consider the subtopics you will cover in the quiz. Including subtopics help make your quiz well-rounded and cover as much as possible. By understanding the goal of your quiz and the subtopic, you can create questions more easily.

For example, if you want to test your employees’ knowledge on workplace safety, you might ask the following questions in a quiz:

These questions will help you determine if an employee understands your safety regulations. You could then ask employees with low scores to repeat their safety training module.

Related reading: SurveyMonkey Question Bank

Quizzes should be fun, interactive, and useful. In order to get the most from your quizzes, you should use a variety of question types. Incorporating a range of questions will help keep respondents interested in your content, increasing competition rates and engagement.

Here are some quiz question types you can use:

Each quiz format offers a new way of interacting and engaging with a quiz. A good variety of quiz question types will help to improve engagement while also catering to different learning styles that respondents may have. 

Related reading: How to write good survey & poll questions

Another important step when writing quiz questions is to ensure they’re interesting for respondents. What one person considers to be a good quiz might not be the same for another.

With that in mind, here are some useful tips to help write compelling quiz questions. 

One of the most vital elements to making a good quiz is knowing who is going to take that quiz. The audience interacting with the quiz will have preferences that influence everything from your writing style to the type of questions you select.

You can use demographic and psychographic surveys to gain insight into the proportion of people that make up your audience. Using this data, you can adapt your quizzes to best relate to your leading demographics.

You could even take this one step further and use audience segmentation with your quizzes. Segmenting your audience will allow you to deliver highly personalized quizzes, improving interaction and completion rates. 

No matter how insightful, interesting, or engaging your quiz is, people won’t take it if it's too long. Be sure to keep your quiz as concise as possible. Try to limit the number of questions that your quiz has. On average, it’s a good idea to make it possible to complete a quiz in under five minutes. If possible, aim for two or three minutes.

A concise quiz will help to increase the completion rate, alongside improving the experience of an employee or customer when taking the quiz.

Your business should also consider the language you use when writing your quizzes. If any questions are difficult to read or interpret, you might frustrate users and cause them to exit without finishing.

Where possible, streamline and edit your quiz to make it short and to the point. 

Every question you include on your quiz will increase the total time it takes for a user to finish the quiz. Controlling and limiting the number of questions you include will allow your customers to finish in minutes.

A useful check you can do before publishing your quiz is to go through the questions and look for any that may not offer you much additional data. Each question in your quiz should serve a specific purpose. If a question is obvious or overly simple, then you’re wasting time. Not only will respondents feel frustrated when answering obvious questions, but you’re increasing the work for your analysts without getting more from the data.

The final tip to consider when writing compelling quiz questions is to include visual content where possible. Humans can process visual stimuli much more quickly than the written word, making this a great medium to speed up your quiz. 

There are numerous ways of using visual elements in your quizzes:

A good quiz strikes a fair balance between difficulty levels. Varying the difficulty of the content you include will help you create a more engaging quiz and provide your business with more useful data.

If a quiz is full of too-easy questions, you’re likely to get a very low variance in your results. Conversely, you might demotivate your employees or customers if the quiz is too hard. 

A fair balance between easy and difficult questions gives all your respondents a level playing field while increasing their learning potential. This type of quiz will give your business greater insight into your respondents' skills or knowledge. 

A good way to ascertain and balance the difficulty of your quiz is to pretest it. You can either do this internally in the department developing the quiz or with a small, representative group of employees or customers.

A pretest quiz will generate an initial batch of data. You can compare this data to your team's expected results and see if it aligns. You can also send a survey asking respondents how they found the quiz. The responses to these questions will help identify areas that are too easy or too difficult in the quiz. They can also point to any questions that you need to reword for clarity.

Around 27% of adults in the USA have some type of disability, many of which can create barriers when it comes to accessing online content. By prioritizing web accessibility in your quizzes, you help to remove these barriers and ensure everyone who wants to can engage with your quizzes.

Especially when making online quizzes, you have every possible tool at your disposal to ensure high levels of accessibility. Here are some tips you can use when creating accessible forms online:

After testing, refining, and optimizing your quiz for accessibility, it’s time to launch! This stage of making a quiz online is where your hard work pays off. You can now send the quiz out and watch as responses flow back in.

Here are a few marketing channels you can use to distribute and promote your quiz.

Social media is a fantastic platform to distribute your quiz as it offers such a high degree of connectivity. For example, if you tweet out a link to your survey on X (formerly Twitter), it only takes one person retweeting the survey to expose it to a whole new list of potential interactions.

Additionally, you could use some of your marketing budget to spread your survey to even more users. If you’re going for quantity, then social media is a great platform to start with.

Your blogs are an invaluable tool for bringing organic traffic to your site. Hosting your quiz on various blogs exposes any user who lands on a blog to the chance of taking your quiz. If you want to gain as much data as possible, this can be a great way of continuously getting new responses over time.

Placing the quiz on your homepage or a similar page that many people will see can help increase the number of responses you get.

For companies with an extensive mailing list, distributing your quiz via email is a great way to increase your response rate. People who have already subscribed to your mailing list probably have high loyalty to your brand. These people will likely respond to your quiz if you directly ask them to do so.

Email is also a great medium if your quiz goes directly to your employees. As email is a direct form of communication, you can quickly send an email with a link to your online quiz. Employees can click on the quiz and get started in seconds.

Depending on the type of quiz you’ve sent out, someone’s score on the questions may be an important factor. For quizzes that aim to test someone’s knowledge, it’s a good idea to share their score with them. You could even let them go back through the quiz and see the correct answer for each section.

Some quizzes work well with this style of instant results. However, for other quizzes, keeping the correct answer private might be in your company’s best interest. For example, many job interviews use quizzes to assess an employee’s critical thinking in key situations.

If you make the answers to your quiz public after someone finishes, they could easily start a new session and select all the right answers. 

After launching your quiz, you’ll hopefully see responses trickle back in. It’s important to monitor your quiz response rate. If lots of people open your quiz but only a few finish it, then you have more optimization to do to create a better quiz experience.

Depending on the platform you use to create your quiz, you may be able to look at the interaction data. From this data, you can look at half-finished quizzes to see where people stopped responding. If you notice that many people click off after a certain question, your survey length or that particular question could need some reworking.

Another way to improve your quiz over time is to gather feedback on it. Request quiz feedback from any participants. Ask questions like, “Would you recommend the experience of taking this quiz to a colleague or friend?” This form of Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) question will determine overall satisfaction with your quiz.

You can also ask open-ended questions that ask for general improvements that users would like to see in your quizzes. Collect this information, analyze the data, and turn it into actionable steps to improve your quiz content. 

Don’t forget to respond to any feedback and detail the actions you’re taking because of it. Closing the feedback loop will keep quiz respondent satisfaction high and show that you actively want to improve your quizzes. 

If you want to create an effective online quiz quickly, use the free SurveyMonkey quiz templates. Look at the following selection of quizzes to get a feel for the structure, form, and content your quiz could use. 

The online grammar quiz template allows teachers to test their students’ knowledge of basic English grammar. The quiz offers a range of sentences with errors in them, with students having to identify the error. 

This quiz helps teachers to identify any problem areas that students have with grammar. They can then work together to improve upon these areas and develop a stronger understanding of grammar. This quiz is effective as it's simple, short, and balances easy and harder questions well.

Test your grammar or create your own grammar quiz.

The online new hire training quiz template aims to assess a new employee’s knowledge of your business. This quiz asks questions like, “Which of these are our company’s values?” and “What is our company’s brand promise?” to test the knowledge of your employees.

Businesses can use this quiz right after the onboarding process to determine whether or not the onboarding was successful. Telling employees you expect them to take a short quiz on the onboarding content will also ensure they pay attention to all onboarding materials. 

The corporate legal training quiz aims to test an employee’s knowledge of various corporate legal matters. For example, the quiz moves through topics like confidentiality, intellectual property, and plagiarism. It asks true and false or select-all-that-apply questions to measure whether or not the employee is familiar with the topic.

This quiz is most effective after an employee finishes a legal training module. It will measure how much they recall from the training and could serve as a pass-or-fail test.

A TV award show quiz is an example of a highly entertaining quiz. You could use this quiz as a template for any fun topics that aren’t quite as serious. For example, you can use this quiz to test your coworkers’ knowledge of a pop-culture subject to give everyone a small break.

This TV award show quiz asks questions like, “Who was the youngest person at the 2020 award show to win the award for Best Lead Actress in a Drama?” and “Which first lady of the United States has won a Television Academy Award?”

Quizzes are a fantastic way of testing employees, getting information from clients, or simply having fun. Following these ten steps, you’ll be able to create a dynamic and engaging quiz in no time.

Get started by using one of our pre-written quiz templates or create your own. 

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.