I wasn’t sure what to do for a quiz example at first. I thought about using one of those “Which Prog Rock Band Are You?” examples, but a quick search for quizzes brought me to this Buzzfeed example. As a geography nerd I am attracted to weird things like this. I’m not sure if I would call it annoying, but it sure is addicting.
What is the experience? Who is the audience?
This is a very simple, yet highly entertaining quiz. It’s all on a single page. It’s all within a window on a single page. Despite sounding overly simple or boring, its actually quite challenging. You begin by selecting all cities in the given list which are capital cities. As long as you keep choosing correctly, you get to keep going. But as the list narrows the stakes get higher. As you progress and select cities it gives you a total of how many in the list are still left. As soon as you select an incorrect city that is not in fact a capital city, you lose, the game is over and you get the option to retry with a new list. Because its a Buzzfeed quiz I assume the audience would be a younger demographic. It would also attract geography nerds like me, students, people with time to kill, procrastinators, people studying for a geography bee, and people studying for Jeopardy.
What about this example is provocative/interesting?
The strength of this quiz is its simplicity. Its really pretty brilliant how simple yet addicting the format is. As you keep choosing capitals correctly you get to continue and it has a running bar that shows you many you have found out of the 21 total and how many you have left to find. I guess you could view it as a game in addition to a quiz.
Its so quick and its easy to replay once you lose. They make it easy to share through different social media platforms so you can annoy your friends. Because many of the capitals appear repeatedly in every successive replay, you can learn from your mistakes and improve your score. Its sort of like the game “Memory” and you will find yourself struggling to remember if a certain city is a capital or not even though the last game’s outcome told you the answer. You begin to doubt yourself and the stress builds, and you choose. Wisely or foolishly.
What about this example is successful?
Like I was discussing earlier the strengths are in the simplicity and and speed. Its easy to fail and quickly start over fresh with no consequences other than having to begin from the beginning. It embodies the idea of learning from our mistakes. I suppose if you are really crazy you could keep a notepad nearby and put a check mark next to every city that is correct so you can repeat it, but then you might as well just google every capital before you click it if you want to cheat. But where is the fun in that? Its supposed to be a test of your knowledge and memory.
How might you make it even better?
It would be neat to have the cities laid out on a world map, or in a google earth style, but it’s not essential. The list format works fine. Other than that, I can’t think of a way to improve this quiz. Oh and if you are wondering about my best score, its 18. Damn you São Paulo. You should be a capital… Yes I want to try again. You will too. Here’s the link: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/can-you-score-full-marks-in-this-capital-city-minefield-quiz?utm_term=.pay1AvlRL#.dfyKWdaMl
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