Google Forms for Research and Collaboration
May 13, 2021

Google Forms for Research and Collaboration

Joshua Welsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Forms

Students in technical writing and other user research classes often use Google Forms to build surveys. Also, colleagues use Google Forms to gather feedback for peer review of scholarly articles. It helps to gather feedback from a wide range of people. One big attribute is that it is easy to use and easy for students and other academic users to distribute.
  • User Research Surveys
  • Peer Feedback on Academic Articles
  • Student Feedback on Program and Course Planning Choices
  • Permissions Settings
  • Reporting Options
  • Since it's free, the tools has not impacted the budget.
Google Forms is easier to use than Qualtrics, but has less robust capabilities, especially in terms of sharing, permissions, survey logic, and reporting features.
I also find Google easier to use than the Microsoft Forms tool, but again Microsoft might have better options in terms of user authentication, depending on whether the rest of the organization uses Microsoft for email, etc.

Do you think Google Forms delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google Forms's feature set?

Yes

Did Google Forms live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Google Forms go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Forms again?

Yes

Google Forms has a fairly intuitive user interface. I think the one aspect which could use improvement is making it easier for survey builders to understand the sharing permissions that have been attached to each survey. For example, I have filled out Google Forms and then discovered that all participants' answers were visible to all other participants. This was due to user error, which ultimately comes down to usability.
I have never sought support for Google Forms, so I can't rate this aspect of the tool.
Google Forms is a great option for quickly putting together a survey and distributing it to gather feedback on a topic. It works best for close-ended and ratings-scale-type questions. It can be used to gather open-ended feedback, but doing so requires more work on the backend of the project, since the researcher will potentially need to read through a large amount of descriptive text.

Google Forms Feature Ratings

Survey templates
7
Themes
5
Custom logo/branding
Not Rated
Changes to live survey
7
Question design help
3
Multiple question types
7
Not Rated
Survey logic flexibility
Not Rated
Response tracking
Not Rated
Data export
7
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
Not Rated
Analytics
Not Rated
Respondent restrictions
Not Rated
Access controls
7
Compliance
Not Rated