Google Surveys vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

Google Surveys is perfect when trying to collaborate with co-workers and find a date & time that works best for them to get together, whether it's for a regular meeting, team photo session, celebratory dinner, or Christmas celebration. It's also great for getting feedback on proposed changes that would affect the team.

Incentivized

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

• Measure the pulse of how our members are feeling (yes/no questions, multiple-choice questions).
• Learn how students are doing with specific projects (textual-based questions, essay-type answers).
• Run an election for board members (use of the "other" notation so that people can write in their own choices).

Incentivized

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• While it is very intuitive, there are many ways you can fine-tune your survey (such as word limits, counts, etc) and these are not always obvious where those settings are.
• I would like to see some ways of changing the formatting (and maybe I just haven't explored that yet), ie: colors, set up on the screen.

Incentivized

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

Relatively simple so that those who are less than familiar with computers can figure it out. User friendly and already embedded with other Google products. Receives an 8 because many features available with Google Surveys are also available with similar, free products on the internet today. Good, but not stellar.

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

This is by far the only area where I think that there is room for improvement because Google does not respond as fast as I would like them to. We live in a fast-paced world and this is probably the only area where Google can improve on and as a teacher, I find it challenging to wait for a day or two for a response when everything that I am doing in the Google Classroom is running instantly and with no breaks in between.

Incentivized

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

Google is a quick and easy to use survey analysis tool that allows you to send cheap or free surveys to an audience. In comparison to tools like SurveyMonkey I would have more faith in the Google technology and robustness of sample. As we have Microsoft 365, sometimes Microsoft forms is a preferred internal source of surveying for free and easily analysing the data. For more robust and accurate market research projects, or even just insights that I can trust more, I would recommend a Market Research Provider as they offer a lot more options to target a key audience and you can rely on their data a bit more - it is weighted, nationally representative etc. Companies with their own research panels tend to have greater data quality that you can put more trust in

Incentivized

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

• Google Surveys are responded by our customers - dealers, retailers and end users. As it's easy to handle, greater is its adoption and hence it definitely has a good ROI.
• Employees as internal stakeholders also use it well to drive initiatives & projects within the organization. This enhances their engagement showcasing digital workplace and hence again a good ROI.

Incentivized

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.