Here are some of the best questions for an API developers survey about developer onboarding experience, alongside tips on crafting them for meaningful insight. You can build an advanced survey like this using Specific in seconds.
Best open-ended questions for API developers survey about developer onboarding experience
Open-ended questions fuel genuine, detailed feedback and often reveal unexpected insights about onboarding. They're invaluable when you want your API developer audience to share raw perspectives, describe pain points, or suggest improvements—especially when you don’t want to constrain answers to predefined options.
What aspects of our API onboarding process helped you get started most quickly?
Which steps in onboarding caused the most confusion or delays for you?
Describe a challenge you faced during the onboarding process and how you overcame it.
How did the quality of documentation impact your onboarding experience?
Can you share a moment when you felt “stuck” or unsupported as you began using our API?
What suggestions do you have for improving our onboarding experience for new API developers?
If you’ve onboarded with other APIs, how does your experience with ours compare?
Which resources (tutorials, guides, support) did you find most or least valuable?
How effectively did our onboarding prepare you to integrate our API into your workflow?
What’s one thing you wish you knew before starting with our API?
As a best practice, we've seen how useful open-ended questions can be for surfacing issues that aren’t visible in data alone. For example, while 81% of new hires feel overwhelmed during onboarding across many industries [1], only personalized feedback reveals the actual nature of that overwhelm for developers integrating an API.
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for API developers survey about developer onboarding experience
Single-select multiple-choice questions let us quantify feedback. They’re perfect when we want to measure sentiment, spot bottlenecks, or nudge developers into deeper conversation—sometimes it’s easier to pick an option than draft a full answer. Then, with follow-ups, we get richer context.
Question: How would you rate the clarity of our onboarding documentation?
Very clear
Somewhat clear
Not clear
Question: How quickly were you able to make your first successful API call?
Within 1 hour
Within 1 day
More than 1 day
Question: Which onboarding resource did you use most?
Written documentation
Interactive tutorials
Community/forum support
Other
When to followup with "why?" Always ask “why” when you want to move beyond numbers. If someone says onboarding wasn’t clear, a quick “Why wasn’t it clear to you?” can surface overlooked flaws or missing guides.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Add "Other" if you’re not certain you’ve covered every scenario—let developers specify unique resources or blockers you never anticipated. Rich, unexpected follow-up responses often point you to gaps in the onboarding materials or community content.
NPS question for API developers onboarding experience
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful format for measuring loyalty and advocacy, especially in technical onboarding. For API developers, asking how likely they are to recommend your API’s onboarding process to a colleague yields a global metric—and, more importantly, you can trigger smart followups to drill into their reasoning. A great NPS flow can be created instantly using Specific’s NPS survey builder.
Given that only 12% of employees strongly agree their onboarding is effective [3], tracking NPS throughout onboarding can quickly pinpoint friction points or missed expectations, helping you iterate much faster.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions are where conversational surveys outshine traditional formats. Inspired by automated follow-ups in Specific, smart probing digs for context, motivation, and root causes—dramatically improving survey quality. For developer onboarding, AI follow-ups mean you don’t lose nuance when a respondent gives an ambiguous or surface-level answer.
API Developer: "The setup was long."
AI follow-up: "Can you specify which part of the setup took the most time or required more support?"
How many followups to ask? In most cases, 2-3 follow-ups are enough to uncover depth without overwhelming. Specific lets you cap the number, or move on as soon as you get the insights you’re after.
This makes it a conversational survey: Instead of a cold form, the survey becomes a guided, dynamic conversation—respondents feel heard, and are more willing to open up.
AI response analysis, unstructured feedback: Even when every answer is freeform text, analyzing responses at scale is easy with tools like Specific’s AI survey response analysis. It clusters themes and summarizes results—so you work smarter, not harder.
Automated follow-ups are a major leap. Try generating a survey and see this conversational experience in action for your next developer onboarding feedback loop.
How to prompt ChatGPT for great API developer onboarding questions
You can get creative with prompt engineering to generate strong survey content. Start simple:
Prompt for open-ended ideas:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for API developers survey about developer onboarding experience.
But if you want even better results, include more context about your audience, the situation, your goals, and what you want to achieve. For example:
I'm designing a survey for new API developers to understand their onboarding experience using our platform. Our product serves fintech startups, and we recently restructured our documentation. Please suggest 10 open-ended questions to uncover pain points and opportunities for improvement, focusing on both technical and emotional aspects of onboarding.
Next, ask the AI to organize and refine:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Finally, double down on depth by prompting for more in categories that matter:
Generate 10 questions for categories: Documentation Usability, Support Touchpoints, Emotional Experience.
Use AI survey editing tools if you want to go from rough prompts to a polished conversational flow, ensuring your survey feels like it was crafted by a research expert.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey is an AI-powered chat-like interview experience—where follow-ups adapt to each answer, probing deeper just like a skilled moderator would do in live interviews. Unlike rigid forms, they feel natural, build rapport, and often yield far richer responses.
Here’s how AI-driven survey generation stacks up against manual approaches:
Manual Survey Creation | AI-Generated Conversational Survey |
|---|---|
Time-consuming to create high-quality, dynamic questions and logic | AI generates, structures, and optimizes questions instantly, informed by best practices |
Rigid and linear, rarely adapts to actual answers | Chat-like, adaptive, instantly asks the right follow-up for every answer |
Harder to analyze complex, open-ended responses | AI clusters and summarizes feedback, making actionable insights accessible to everyone |
User experience can feel cold or impersonal | Feels like a natural conversation, increasing both engagement and response depth |
Why use AI for API developers surveys? Fast-moving teams can’t wait days or weeks to surface blockers in onboarding—it’s far more effective to launch an AI survey example, generate probing follow-ups, and distill insights in minutes. Plus, AI makes it easy even for non-researchers to design world-class developer onboarding studies.
Specific leads the way in conversational survey experiences. Whether you want to create an onboarding survey or analyze results later, the process is smooth for both the survey designer and the respondent—no matter how technical your audience.
See this developer onboarding experience survey example now
Jump into a tailored survey experience for API developer onboarding—explore smart question design, conversational AI, and deep analysis in one place. Create your own conversational AI survey today and unlock the best developer feedback you’ve ever had.