Google Forms is the pragmatist's survey tool.
August 28, 2018

Google Forms is the pragmatist's survey tool.

William Laurienti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Forms

Composed uses Google forms to create surveys for client research in the process of building ideal customer avatars. It's an easy way to collect large amounts of data for later sorting, and it provides a lot of control over how tight (name/email address required) or loose (anonymous) you want to be in collecting data from the people you survey.

Pros

  • The best part about Google Forms is that it's free. There are prettier solutions out there, but not at no cost, and that's important if you're running a small operation and won't use the product every month to generate the revenue to cover the cost of that solution.
  • I like that Forms has a lot of question types so that you can control the data type for graphable data but leave the responses open for answers that may directly find their way into your messaging.
  • It's also important that you can drop the data straight into a Google Spreadsheet so that you can manipulate it to look for trends.

Cons

  • Sorry, Google, but Forms is ugly. You can mess with the look a little bit to give it a branded feel, but you'll never get something beautiful like you might in Typeform or something similar. That said, it's hard to look a free gift horse in the mouth.
  • I'd like to see a few more response types offered.
  • None.
I've only played with Typeform, but if making surveys enjoyable and nice to look at is important to you, it's definitely a better product. Forms is the pragmatist's tool, not the artist's. Dubsado's survey tool is decent, but you don't have a way to collect broad data sets there, so Forms wins on that front.
The best marketing use I've found for Forms is collecting a good sample size for preliminary surveys to direct a company's messaging. If you can get enough participation to make it worthwhile, the ability to manage the data in Sheets is as good as about anything, and if you need to do more with it you can export a .CSV file and drop into another program (I've never needed this).

This is not the kind of software you want to wow a potential client with or use to collect prospect information from your website on. It never quite looks polished enough to use for your contact forms, etc...

Google Forms Feature Ratings

6.0
Survey templates
6
Themes
6
Custom logo/branding
6
8.0
Changes to live survey
8
Question design help
8
Multiple question types
8
7.0
Survey logic flexibility
7
7.6
Response tracking
8
Data export
9
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
7
Analytics
7
Survey Integrations ()
Not Rated
Survey Automation ()
Not Rated
8.0
Respondent restrictions
8
8.0
Access controls
8

Using Google Forms

The program is just intuitive to use. You don't have to spend time searching the internet for guides- it just works.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • I wouldn't call any of its function elegant, but it's simple enough, and it gets the job done.
  • My only trouble using it is that it's impossible to make look like your survey was built in this decade.
Yes - It's almost as easy to use on the phone as it is on a desktop.

Comments

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