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Phase 3: Questionnaire Design — From Idea to Final Draft

With your project workspaces established, the next phase is to collaboratively build and refine the survey. The Survey Creator is the central tool for this process, allowing for rapid drafting, precise editing, and seamless team feedback.

Scenario: For the ‘Luxury Brands’ study, the initial questionnaire was created by uploading the client’s Word doc into the “Luxury Brands – Internal” project. Now, the project team needs to refine it and add a new section on sustainability.

 

Step 1: Brainstorm and Draft with AI #

If a questionnaire is already available, the most common approach is to use the “Document to survey” method to generate the survey structure directly.

When no questionnaire is available, or when you need to add a new section to an existing survey, the “Idea to survey” feature can help you quickly generate draft content from a prompt.

This is a powerful tool for avoiding the “blank page” problem and accelerating your design process.

Use Case 1: Generating a Full First Draft
If a client provides only a research brief (without a questionnaire), you can generate a complete draft to kickstart the brainstorming process.

  • Example Prompt: “Create a 15-question brand perception survey for a luxury fashion brand. Include sections on brand awareness, purchase intent, and brand image. The target audience is adults aged 25-55 in USA, UK, France and Germany.”

Use Case 2: Adding a New Section (Our Scenario)
The client wants to add questions about sustainability. Instead of writing them manually, we can generate a draft.

  1. Navigate to your internal project and open the Survey Creator.
  2. Use the AI Assistant feature. More Info: AI Assistant
  3. Enter a detailed prompt, such as: “Generate 5 questions after S5 about consumer perceptions of sustainability in luxury fashion, including brand ethics and materials.”
  4. Click The “View changes and save survey” button.
 

Step 2: Collaborate on the Draft with TrackEntry #

Once the new questions are added, your team can review them directly within the Survey Editor. Instead of sending feedback via email, use the integrated TrackEntry feature for contextual comments.

Best Practice: Have a senior researcher review the new questions. If they have a suggestion—for example, to rephrase a question—they can click the TrackEntry icon directly on that specific survey element. This creates a new ticket linked to that exact question, ensuring the feedback is clear, traceable, and never lost.

 

Step 3: Refine the Survey in the Editor #

Acting on the feedback is simple. The project manager can see the new comment in TrackEntry, click the link to go directly to the question in the Survey Editor, and make the necessary changes to the text, answer options, or question type.

 

Step 4: Validate the Survey with ResearchReady #

Before sharing the survey for client approval or handing it over for programming, run ResearchReady to check the questionnaire for logic, quality, compliance, and respondent experience.

ResearchReady helps identify potential issues early, such as routing gaps, survey fatigue, data quality risks, or localization concerns. This allows the project team to resolve problems before the survey moves into programming or client review.

To run the analysis, open ResearchReady from the Survey Creator or Project Dashboard, select the relevant analysis modules, and review the generated findings.

Step 5: Get Client Approval with Version Highlighting #

After your internal team is happy with the updates, you need to get final sign-off from the client. The best way to do this is to provide a document that clearly shows only what has changed.

  1. From the Survey Editor’s top menu, click the Download icon.
  2. Select the “Questionnaire (PDF)” option.
  3. In the pop-up, select the previous version of the survey (before you added the new section) and the most recent version.
  4. Crucially, enable the “Highlight changes” toggle.

This will generate a PDF of the full questionnaire, but with all the new or edited text clearly highlighted. This makes the review process incredibly efficient for your client, as they can focus only on the updates.

 

By combining the AI drafting tools with integrated feedback and version control, your team can design and finalize questionnaires faster, more collaboratively, and with a fully documented audit trail of all changes.