Monday Moan: If You Need a 20-Question Quiz, You’ve Already Lost Me
A particular kind of online marketing has started to irritate me more and more.
Monday Moans, where I take out my frustrations on you instead of my wife. She doesn’t listen to my complaints anyway.
So far, so good.
Then, instead of telling you what the product actually does, it asks you to take an assessment.
And not a little one.
You are presented with a series of questions about your goals, habits, ambitions, frustrations, personality, working style and where you supposedly want to be in five years.
What matters most to you right now?
What is your biggest challenge?
How would you describe your current situation?
What would you like to achieve?
And then there are usually several more screens of the same sort.
At some point I start wondering whether I came to buy something or accidentally applied for a job.
I have stopped taking the tests
I used to play along and answer the questions because I was genuinely interested in the product. I assumed the assessment was there for a good reason. Perhaps it would produce a genuinely useful recommendation or tailor the product to my needs.
But I’ve gradually become rather skeptical.
If I am interested in a product, tell me what the product does.
Give me the features. Show me examples. Let me see the price. Tell me who it is intended for and what problem it solves.
Then let me decide whether it is useful.
I don’t particularly want to spend ten minutes answering questions before being allowed to discover that the product costs €79.99 a year.
And I certainly don’t want to be told that I have now been “analysed” and that the computer has discovered my ideal path to success.
It hasn’t.
It has discovered which boxes I ticked.
The problem isn’t personalization
I have nothing against personalization.
If a service can genuinely use information about me to make the product more useful, that’s perfectly reasonable.
What annoys me is when the assessment feels less like a useful diagnostic tool and more like a sales funnel wearing a lab coat.
The questions give the impression that something sophisticated is happening behind the scenes. Perhaps an algorithm is analyzing my answers and constructing a carefully tailored experience just for me.
Maybe it is.
But sometimes I suspect the actual process is closer to:
Answer A → show product X.
Answer B → show product X with slightly different wording.
And if the purpose of the questions is simply to get me emotionally invested before revealing the price, the only emotion I feel is annoyance.
I recently encountered another example
I recently came across an AI learning service. It looked interesting.
The first thing it wanted me to do was answer a question about what mattered most to me: earning more, building a new income, feeling more stable, or moving beyond the traditional nine-to-five.
That immediately made me pause.
I hadn’t asked it to analyze my life.
I was interested in finding out what the service actually offered.
There is a subtle but important difference.
If I walk into a shop because I am interested in a camera, I don’t expect the salesperson to begin by asking me twenty questions about my aspirations, financial goals and relationship with photography before allowing me to see the camera.
Show me the camera.
I can tell you afterwards whether I want it.
And yes, I realize that I may be doing myself out of something
Perhaps some of these assessments are genuinely useful. (I doubt it!)
Perhaps I have walked away from several excellent products because I couldn’t be bothered to complete their introductory questionnaire.
That is entirely possible.
But that’s the company’s problem, not mine.
Because the moment I see a long assessment before I can properly investigate a product, there is a very simple thought that crosses my mind:
No. (There might be a word in front of “No”, but let’s skip that here).
And I close the page.
At that point, the company hasn’t had a chance to show me their product.
It has simply lost a potential customer.
Give me enough information to make my own decision
Perhaps this is an old-fashioned attitude, but I prefer to make my own decisions.
Tell me what the product is, what it costs, and what it can do.
Show me what other people think of it.
Give me enough information to decide whether it solves a problem I actually have.
If you want to offer me a free assessment afterwards, that’s fine.
But don’t put the assessment between me and the information I came looking for.
Because I won’t take it.
And I won’t come back.
Monday Moan over.
I am not ticking off more boxes. I am ticked off enough as it is.
Have you been looking over my shoulder?
Of course! I see you when you’re sleeping, I know when you’re awake
I know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!
You have far more patience than I!!
If the questions are from someone I know .. fine .. but a web site — I’m gone as fast as I can find the exit.