A Beginner’s Guide to Leveraging AI for Questionnaire Design

AI has emerged as a game-changing tool in the social and marketing insights space, revolutionizing many of our processes. It may seem daunting at first but its potential to improve sampling, research design, data analysis, reporting, and even questionnaire design is unmatched.

Questionnaire design requires a unique blend of art and science, a mix of both technical precision and creative flair, in order to create a positive consumer experience. This makes it a perfect candidate for AI as AI can balance both analytical requirements and imaginative solutions. Below, we consider some of the most effective ways AI can help you craft more impactful questionnaires.

Create a straw dog/draft questionnaire

For some people, putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is the most difficult part of the job. In such cases, AI can build a draft questionnaire to stimulate ideas. Give the AI information about key research objective, secondary objectives, target audiences, desired outcomes, and ask for a 30 minute or 50 item questionnaire.

From this overly lengthy questionnaire, you can then identify which types of questions actually meet your needs and cast the others aside. Edit the final result to create a set of questions that meet your needs.

• “Sales of our soda have been declining among people aged 16 to 34 in the southern states. Create a 30-minute questionnaire to help me understand why people are buying less soda and what they want to see changed. See if it has anything to do with people moving out of state or with employment.”

Improve response options

Particularly in countries that are large or have diverse cultural communities, it’s impossible to know all the brands or ideas that should be included in an answer list. AI can easily create a list of 50, 30 or 10 items in order of popularity, awareness, or effectiveness for your consideration. To ensure you’ve got a comprehensive list that can be fine-tuned to your research needs, ask for different categories of options.

While these types of lists can’t be considered perfect or complete, they can turn a thirty-minute brainstorming and desk research task into a five-minute task.

• “List 10 organic supermarkets across the USA.”
• “List 10 independent supermarkets across the USA.”
• “List the 10 least popular supermarkets across the USA.”
• “List the 10 most popular supermarkets across the USA.”
• “List the 2 most popular supermarkets in each state of the USA.”
• “List the 10 most popular supermarkets in big cities across the USA.”
• “List the 10 most popular supermarkets in towns or rural areas across the USA.”

Rewrite awkward questions

Even those of us who write questionnaires every day write questions that are too long, awkward, ambiguous, or complicated. Rather than wasting time pushing words around for 15 minutes, drop the question into an AI tool and ask for five different versions of the question. Chances are you’ll see a couple of configurations that can be edited to better meet your needs.

• “Give me five different versions of this question.”
• “Rewrite this question so it is easier to read by someone who has a 9th grade reading level.”

Write more creative questions

Not only can AI help us improve the grammar and readability of questions, it can also help create more interesting and engaging questions. If you’re not currently in a creative frame of mind, ask your AI to write 20 questions that are fun and creative. From that initial list, you can then choose and edit the best options.

• “Write 20 fun, creative questions about recommending this brand of soda.”
• “Write 20 fun, creative questions about recommending this brand of soda using a five-point scale.”
• “Write 20 questions about recommending this brand of soda. You can use expressions or idioms but make sure people don’t have to know the idiom to understand the question.”

Correct biased or insensitive questions

Language interpretations change so quickly it can be hard to ensure you’ve not unknowingly incorporated controversial language into your questionnaire. AI is a great start for identifying potentially problematic language and suggesting alternatives. Once the AI has done its job and you’ve revised problematic questions, be sure to get final input from experts in language or culture.

• “Identify any insensitive, biased, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or other inappropriate language in this questionnaire. Provide alternative wording.”

Write engaging and empathetic exit notes

We’ve all used the templated thank you notes at the end of questionnaires: “Thank you for your participation. You may now close this page.” They’re boring, impersonal, and they don’t send participants off with a genuine feeling of appreciation.

Fortunately, AI can create fun and entertaining notes that send participants off feeling good about the experience. Similarly, AI can build draft personal thank you notes that are more appropriate for serious or sensitive questionnaires.

• “Write five fun thank you notes for the end of a questionnaire about soda.”
• “Write five empathetic thank you notes for the end of a questionnaire about mental health.”

General tips

Using AI to design questionnaires is an easy and safe entry into the AI world. Just remember a few key considerations.

1. Start with AI and finish with people. When AI is used to enhance creativity, it will give you amazing ideas that will drastically improve your work. However, it will also come up with ideas that are wrong, irrelevant, and inappropriate. You are the final decision maker and final approvals are always your responsibility.
2. Give details ad context. As fantastic as AI is, it can’t read your mind. Give it as much information and context as you can, including any specific sources you’re interested in, being careful to not share any proprietary details.
3. Ask for many options and revisions. Unlike working with people, AI won’t get tired, bored, or annoyed if you ask for 50 new ideas and revisions for each one. Every idea has the potential to generate five more ideas, and some of them will be perfect. Keep asking for more creative options and revising until you’re happy to make final edits of the options.
4. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or how to express your idea. AI is great at decrypting poorly expressed ideas so don’t waste valuable time correcting your spelling or drafting perfect sentences. Write those prompts fast. Not great.

Summary

Designing a questionnaire can be time-consuming and challenging. Fortunately, free AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek can make the process faster, smarter, and more effective. Whether you’re a researcher, marketer, or business owner, you can leverage AI to create more engaging, high-quality questionnaires that deliver actionable insights. With AI, you can say goodbye to guesswork and hello to smarter surveys. If you’re ready to give AI a try, please get in touch with one of our survey experts. We can even show you how AI can be used to code and analyze qualitative data!