Your quiz should ask enough questions to give someone a useful result that makes sense for them. The number depends on what you’re helping them understand and what you need to know to guide them.
Each question should help distinguish between outcomes, assess a relevant part of their situation, or contribute to the advice you give them.
Start with what someone wants to get out of taking your quiz. Then define the possible results and what makes each one different. Once you know those distinctions, you can decide which questions you need to ask.
Imagine you’re creating a quiz that recommends a workout program. Someone’s goals matter, but so does the equipment they have available. Their previous experience may matter, too. A program they can realistically follow depends on understanding those things.
Those questions have a clear purpose. The answers affect what you would recommend.
You might also want to know what has helped them stay consistent in the past. That can give you useful information about which approach would fit their life. Each question adds another relevant piece of the picture.
When reviewing a question, ask yourself:
- What does this tell me about the person?
- How does that information affect their result or the guidance they need?
- Am I already learning the same thing elsewhere in the quiz?
If you can’t explain how the information helps, reconsider the question.
That doesn’t mean every question has to determine the result by itself. Several questions can work together to help you understand a pattern. Someone’s preferences, everyday behavior, and previous experiences may all contribute to the same result while telling you different things.
Look for repetition that adds nothing. If you’ve asked essentially the same question three ways, you may be able to remove one. If each question reveals a different part of the situation, there may be a good reason to keep them.
Quinn Tempest’s Entrepreneurial Purpose quiz offers a historical coaching example.
In an Interact interview updated in 2023, Quinn described helping women entrepreneurs create more purpose and profit in their businesses without burning out. Her quiz helped them explore their entrepreneurial drive through results she called Purpose Profiles.
She developed the profiles before writing the rest of the quiz. Then she had to decide what she needed to ask to guide people toward a fitting result.
Quinn explained that she wanted enough questions to support that guidance while avoiding an overwhelming experience with 40 questions. She included a blend of deeper and lighter questions.
Her approach illustrates why the result matters when deciding the length. She was helping people reflect on something meaningful, and the questions needed to support that reflection while keeping the experience manageable.
The amount of reading also matters.
A quiz with a small number of questions can still feel long if every question contains a paragraph and every answer takes effort to interpret.
Keep one main idea in each question. Make the answer choices brief enough to scan and compare. When several choices share the same context, explain that context once in the question.
Vary the questions where it helps someone respond naturally. You might ask about an everyday situation, then a preference, then something they’ve tried before. Give each question the format and number of choices it needs.
The subject also affects how much ground you need to cover. A quiz assessing several areas of someone’s business needs enough information about each area to make those results useful. A quiz helping someone choose between a few closely related products may have a narrower set of distinctions to explore.
After editing, check the results using different combinations of answers. Make sure people with different needs still receive guidance that fits. Removing a question should preserve the information you need to make those recommendations.
Then take the quiz from beginning to end. Notice where you have to reread something, where choices feel difficult to compare, and where a question seems repetitive.
Use that review to make the experience easier to complete while keeping the questions that help you deliver the answer someone came for.