Microsoft Forms – Improving user experience with intelligent updates

Since becoming generally available to Office 365 commercial users in April, for millions of users, Microsoft Forms is now the programme of choice when it comes to creating surveys, polls and quizzes.

Like other popular Microsoft applications, Forms also benefits from regular updates designed to improve the user experience, with most of these based on customer feedback through UserVoice.

Making investments to improve the Forms experience, Microsoft strives to bring richer intelligence capabilities and deeper administrative controls to their users, developing a sophisticated survey-creation tool.

Recently, Microsoft detailed a range of exciting future updates at their annual Microsoft Ignite conference in Florida – an event we covered in a previous blog.

However, there was also a lot of discussion around Microsoft Forms, with the event outlining a handful of exciting capabilities that will allow uses to create forms faster, surface new insights from response data and enjoy greater administrative flexibility.

Here is a breakdown of some of the proposed updates…

Improved intelligence

When it comes to creating a survey, finding a well-balanced set of questions is critical to generating a healthy amount of useful data.

Design Intelligence understands this and works seamlessly to suggest questions related to the form title, allowing the user to pick pre-made questions without wasting important productivity time.
Forms Ideas works in a similar way, except this time it relates to survey responses.

If you are trying to conduct market research, it’s highly likely that your survey will go to thousands of people, which can make data analysis a difficult process.

Ideas pulls out patterns and trends in your response data and creates visualised charts and graphs of that summary information, eliminating the need to manually aggregate every response individually.

New question type

Users can now add Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions to their forms, which is the default method used for measuring respondent sentiment about an activity.

Providing scaled Likert questions, with response fields including ‘strongly agree’ ‘neither agree or disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’, it allows you to gauge respondent sentiment about specific aspects of your business.

NPS questions can help you analyse customer loyalty, while understanding the success of a recent event, seminar or training session, allowing you to make improvements moving forward.

Once answers are submitted, Forms then gives you an intuitive summary of your Likert results, complete with visualised charts and graphs.

Greater administrative flexibility

Microsoft has now added several improved administrative capabilities to make managing Forms easier.
Ownership transfer now allows users to transfer their form to an Office 365 Group, where it is shown in its own tab and can be managed by any group member. Administrators will also be able to use eDiscovery in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Centre to identify and export content in found in Forms.

All these updates will allow users to conduct surveys, and analyse important data within a group setting, streamlining the entire process at all levels of the business.

Looking to the future...

These three key changes are just a few examples of how Microsoft Forms is being adapted to improve user experience. Understanding that surveys, polls and quizzes should be easy to create and an effective way of gaining important insights, Microsoft has listened to user feedback and implemented changes where necessary.

These latest intelligence ideas will allow businesses to create compelling surveys and generate important results. If you need help gaining insights of your own, then contact our team of specialists and start realising the true potential of your technology.