The team at Riddle are super excited about our new interactive story quiz. Online quizzes have always been great for growing your audience or qualifying leads (AdWeek says quizzes are among ‘the most shared pieces of content‘).

However, they all present the same questions in the same order to every user – until now.

Interactive story quiz: overview

Do you remember those classic ‘Choose your own adventure’ books when you were a kid?

You’d read a page, and then have to choose what happens next. For example, “a door stands before you, but you hear loud breathing. Do you:

1. open it (go to page 87)
2. leave it alone (go to page 56)

Our community wanted even more flexibility with Riddle’s quiz maker. They kept asking ‘Can we show different questions to each user, based on how they respond to each question?’

Our interactive story quiz now makes that easy. (A video ‘how to’ is at the bottom of this post.)

Image credit: cyoa.com

Questions won’t have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers – instead, each response leads to either another question or a final result for that user, along with an explanation.

Interactive story quiz: live example

Here’s a sample of the type of content you create. Imagine you run a careers advice site – with tips and best practices about landing the perfect job.

Instead of a bland list of do’s and don’ts, you create an interactive story – around the many pitfalls facing the interviewee.

Check out our example below:

Interactive story quiz: getting started

Step 1: Map out the flow

Riddle’s quiz creator is super intuitive. However, before you start making your interactive story, we recommend you go a little ‘old school’ and map out the flow of your interactive story quiz.

It helps to have an idea of how each question will lead to the next – and on until the user’s results.

Here’s my initial sketch for my ‘job interview’ quiz example:

Step 2: Set the stage

Give your interactive story quiz a good title and compelling image. This will get people interested to click and start your story.

Step 3: Questions and results

Create your first question – with at least two answer options.

Each answer can lead to:

1. another question
2. a result (which ends the interactive story for that user)

Step 4: Complete one branch first

Each interactive story quiz can be a little complicated to start.

We recommend finishing one ‘branch’ of your story first.

• Follow a potential user’s journey, all the way to a final result.
• For example, go from their question #1 answer and create a good question #2 (or result)
• Then go from that answer and create a question #3 and so on.
• Once you’re at a final result, go back to question #1 and complete the question/results for anyone who answers the 2nd option.
• PRO TIP: save time, and link to existing questions or results whenever possible.

Step 5: Look for orphans

The last step? You want to make sure that each response leads somewhere – to a question or a result.

You can easily spot these ‘orphans’.

If you see a white tab under any question that means one or more responses doesn’t have a follow up question or result assigned.

Step 6: (Optional) Add a lead generation form

Just like all of our quiz types, you can add a lead generation form to our interactive story quiz.

Ask each user for their email and other info before displaying their results – then send this information along with their answers to:

• AWeber
• MailChimp
• Any other CRM or marketing software with Zapier

Interactive story quiz: upcoming features

Our interactive story quiz is new, it’s unique – and it’s very much a work in progress.

Upcoming features in the coming weeks:

• Graphic map – just like the famous London Underground, you’ll get a high level overview how your questions and results branch and end.
• Better formatting – we’re improving the overall ‘prettiness’ and visual clarity of our layout. One key improvement – we’ll move the result text below the result itself.
• Copy questions and branches – a big time saver, this will let you quickly duplicate any existing questions to use in new branches.

Interactive story quiz: video walkthrough

Did we miss anything? This is a new tool – and we’d love to hear how we can make it better.

Please drop us a note at hello@riddle.com – Boris and I read and respond to everyone, generally in under five minutes if we’re awake. 🙂