Grumpy Website

 

This is Hertz's customer satisfaction survey that uses the Inmoment platform.

Free-form fields have a quaint detail strength meter on the side that really is just a word counter. I can't figure out if it's useless and stupid, or whether it's genius.

When you ask a person "What was your experience?", many people will just opt for a one-word answer, "Bad", or "Meh", or "It was ok I guess". So the problem a survey designer faces is, how do you make a person write more than one or two words? For a technically savvy person a word counter disguised like this looks stupid. But is it though?