Create a Facebook Quiz

A few weeks ago I asked people to e-mail me their how-to questions for social networks. “How do I create a quiz on Facebook?” was a popular one. On Facebook, even a simple application like Quiz Creator requires you to click through a lot of pages. I asked LOLapps, the San Francisco start-up that makes Quiz Creator, to help me with these instructions.

STEP 1: Login to your Facebook account. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click the Applications tab in the lower left corner. On the menu that pops up, click Browse More Applications at the bottom.

STEP 2: On the page of apps, there’s a Search Apps box near the upper left corner. Use that the box to search for the app Quiz Creator. I picked Quiz Creator because it’s simple to figure out and has fewer steps than some of the other quiz creators.

STEP 3: Click the Quiz Creator application. On the next page that appears, click the button Go To Application in the upper left corner. Another page will appear to ask you to allow the application to access your personal data. Click Allow. Finally, you’ll get to the page where you start creating the quiz.

STEP 4: On the first page, you’ll be asked to enter some basic information about your quiz. Follow the prompts and enter your quiz name — for example, “What kind of dog are you?” Fill in a short description of the quiz. Upload a picture from your computer to illustrate your quiz.

STEP 5: Enter the results of your quiz — golden retriever, Labrador retriever, German shepherd, French bulldog — as well as the descriptions the quiz taker will see along with their results. Follow the prompts to upload a picture to accompany each result.

STEP 6: Enter the questions for your quiz, and pair the answers with the desired result. For example:

Questions: What is your favorite food?

Answer: Anything – Labrador retriever

Answer: Caviar – poodle

Answer: Steak – German shepherd

Answer: Kibble – golden retriever

STEP 7: Click Next. This takes you to a page with a giant button: Install the Developer App. That pops open a new page. Click Allow. This is where the going gets tricky. Facebook requires lots of clicks to create the actual quiz application.

STEP 8: Go back to the previous page, where there’s another giant button: YES, I have the Developer App. Click that.

STEP 9: Take a deep breath. Exhale. You’re going to need to follow a bunch of instructions to pop up a bunch of windows. Some of them will direct you to yet other windows. The goal is to get some long, gibberish-to-you but important-to-the-computer text strings from one window, and paste them into another. Why do you even have to do that? I don’t know. Facebook isn’t the greatest at user interfaces, and it suffers as a result. Many people will abandon the process here rather than hang in there. You’re a Gadgetwise reader, though, so make me proud and curse this multi-window authentication process even as you complete it. But after a half dozen windows with instructions written by a software developer, asking you to please be patient type this into that window, you’ll suddenly have a page with your quiz displayed on it.

STEP 10: The final step in the quiz creation process requires you to invite one or more Facebook friends to try your quiz. Now you know why you get so many of them.

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