“I prefer one of many... it's more work to fill in a text field than it is to click a button and on top of that if it's like which of the following do you like red green or blue if they choose red it's very easy for you to then say hey if they chose red make the background red”

Force multiple choice — never free text

Multi-choice buttons drive 98-99% click-through to the next question because there's zero cognitive load and the answers are machine-readable for downstream personalization. Free-text input collapses both completion AND your ability to use the data. Use an "Other" with a free-text follow-up only as a release valve, then mine those entries to rephrase existing buttons later.