Simple Guide To Creating A Touchscreen Quiz For Your Exhibition Stand

Touchscreens naturally lend themselves to interactive experiences, and the touchscreen quiz is perhaps the best of the lot. Quizzes sound like a simple idea, but once you consider the different applications you quickly realise just how many possibilities there are for business events.
As we’ve hinted, there are two components on a basic level. You’ll need:

• A rough idea of the quiz you’re going to develop
• A touchscreen of a suitable size; you need it to be easy to use, without being too small for a crowd to see.

What follows is a whistle-stop tour of the key features to an interactive quiz that businesses are offering, and some inspiration that you can use to come up with your own for your next trade show.

Attracting users and Using Rewards

Why should someone play your quiz? How do they even know it’s there? Someone walking by a touchscreen at an event needs a reason to use it. While the touchscreen is not being used make sure there’s a fun animation to pull people in. It should have clear messages and a call to action like ‘Play to Win’, ‘Test Your Knowledge’ or ‘Touch to Start’.  If you offer a reward it will be an incentive to play. However don’t make the mistake of thinking the reward is enough on it’s own. It might get someone to touch the screen to start, but after that it’s all about the experience. Winning the latest iPad is nice, but remember only one person wins and you want everyone to experience your brand in a positive way.
 

Design

Your touchscreen quiz needs to look amazing if it’s going to wow passers-by. It needs a simple layout that’s easy and straightforward to use, but a creative design to make it fun. Use animations rather than static screens, and make the most of the touchscreen by having visual effects when users touch the screen. Don’t complicate things by having complex question types. Stick to multiple choice, ranking or a slider. It’s the content you want people to remember, rather than the intricate gameplay.
 

Content

The essence of a quiz is to make it enjoyable without lecturing people. At the same time you want to reinforce your key messages. So your quiz needs to be light-hearted and engaging, rather than promotional. It can be a marketing tool and show your expertise without explicitly pushing your products onto people. It’s the difference between asking ‘How many countries do we have offices in?’ compared to ‘What’s the population of Asia?’. The second question shows your knowledge and subtly suggests you both cover Asia and know the market, without being pushy. If can crack content and tone, you’re part-way to creating an experience that could go viral through word of mouth. That’s important.
 

Duration

The golden rule here is short and sweet. If you’re at a tradeshow you want high user numbers, but the longer the quiz the less users there will be. It’s simple maths. If the user journey is 5 minutes in total, the maximum plays on one touchscreen in a 6 hour event is 72 plays. Make the user journey 2 minutes and the maximum plays jumps to 180. Why take longer to have the same impact? You can get people engaging with your stand with a short interactive experience, which breaks the ice and leads into a more serious conversation. In fact because it’s short it’s likely to be fun. If people want more they play again, thereby reinforcing your key messages twice over. So as rule, your quiz should have no more than 10 questions with a time limit of 60 seconds. This leaves time for a contact form and a leaderboard.
 

Gamification

It’s time to up the ante; your quiz needs to raise the heartbeat and cause a stir. So have time limit with an onscreen countdown. As and as it gets closer to the end use animations and effects to put the pressure on. With a quiz, getting results – and, importantly, sharing or comparing those results — is key to making the experience work. So most quizzes have some kind of league table or leaderboard. How are you going to make this work at your event? Will it be exciting enough to generate some real competition? Display the top 3 entries on the quiz page so the person playing has something to aim for. Also clearly display their score throughout the quiz. At the end of the quiz show the leaderboard so that users can see their position and play again to try to reach the top. You could even show the results on another, larger, touchscreen.
 

Social Sharing

Use social media to spread the word about your quiz.  Share social media updates as your best scorers climb the ranks. Even better, enable users to share their own scores at the end of the quiz, so they do your marketing for you. As it’s a public facing touchscreen you’ll need to develop the quiz so that when the quiz restarts it automatically logs out of all social media accounts and forgets the last user’s credentials.
 

Data Capture

You’ll probably want to collect some information about the player so that their score is displayed proudly on the leaderboard. This is the point where you can also capture your lead. But be careful. Under GDPR you need to design your interactive software so that consent is explicit here. And to make it fun (and legal) delegates should be able to complete the quiz without using their real name, and without signing up to your list.
 
There’s a lot to think about when designing a quiz for a business event. But the bigger and bolder you go, and the more fun your quiz is, the more chance you have of drawing a crowd.