This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an event attendee survey about event website usability. Let’s dig right into methods and tools that work for analyzing your responses—no fluff, just practical advice.
Choosing the right tools for analyzing survey responses
When it comes to analyzing your event attendee survey data, your approach really depends on the structure of the data you’ve collected. Here’s the quick breakdown:
Quantitative data: If your survey includes straightforward stats—like how many attendees rated your event website as “good,” “average,” or “poor”—then tools like Excel or Google Sheets make it easy to get totals, averages, and quick charts for reporting.
Qualitative data: Things get trickier with open-ended responses or those follow-up questions asking why someone struggled with your site. Reading through piles of these answers manually just isn’t scalable. You need AI-backed survey analysis for this—capable tools can summarize, organize, and distill themes across many open-text responses and follow-ups.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can export your responses and paste them into ChatGPT or a similar GPT-powered tool. This is an accessible way to get started—for smaller datasets, you just paste in your data and ask questions, like “What are the top complaints?” or “Summarize recurring website issues.”
But let’s be real—it’s not very convenient. You’ll need to manually manage your data’s formatting, copy-paste survey responses, and sometimes break up your data set due to context limits (more on that later). You also lose the ability to easily segment, filter, and revisit your insights unless you manage those conversations carefully.
AI survey analysis is growing fast: Tools like iWeaver AI and Looppanel automate the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative survey data, extracting trends and eliminating manual work. That means you can get to the meaningful stuff—user frustrations and themes—without getting bogged down in spreadsheets or endless text [1][2].
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built platforms like Specific take care of the whole process—collecting responses as a conversational survey, then running AI-powered analysis on top.
Specific asks smart follow-up questions in real time, so you get richer, more actionable data. That means your event attendee survey doesn’t bog people down—it gets better insights, while feeling more like a chat than a form. Learn how automatic follow-ups work.
AI analysis in Specific summarizes all open-ended answers instantly, then finds key themes and surfaces them as actionable insights—no export, no manual sorting, just answers you can use. You can interact with these findings directly: chat with the AI, run filters, and ask follow-up analysis questions. You also have full control over which question/answers get sent for AI analysis. See the AI-powered survey analysis feature.
Managing context is a breeze—choose which questions to analyze, and quickly filter out noise for deeper dives, instead of wrestling with copy-paste in open GPT tools.
Other emerging AI tools worth checking: Insight7, Blix, and SurveySensum are all using AI to help teams dig deeper into open-text feedback, finding sentiment, pain points, and suggestions at scale [3][4][5].
If you want to create a survey from scratch, you can try the AI survey generator. Or, to save time for your use case, use the event website usability survey generator for event attendees.
Useful prompts you can use to analyze event attendee survey data about event website usability
Once you’re set up with your survey responses, prompts make it simple to get insights out of AI tools (like Specific or ChatGPT).
Prompt for core ideas: This is my go-to for identifying recurring topics in a big pile of event attendee comments and open responses. Paste this into ChatGPT, Specific, or your AI tool of choice. It always surfaces the main issues and feedback themes by frequency:
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
AI always works better when it has more context. For example, you’ll get sharper, more relevant insights if you tell it a bit about your survey’s goal or audience. Just preface your prompt, like so:
"You are an expert in event website usability. I have survey responses from event attendees describing their experience using our event website. My goal is to find recurring usability issues that frustrated people during registration and schedule browsing."
Once you get the core ideas back, you can ask for more detail. Try: “Tell me more about [core idea]”—swap in whatever main complaint or suggestion you want to dig into.
Prompt for specific topic: Use this when you want to validate whether a certain usability issue came up in responses. Just ask: “Did anyone talk about [navigation speed]?” Bonus tip: add “Include quotes.” to see direct attendee feedback on that pain point.
Prompt for personas: Segment your feedback by attendee type. Prompt: “Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how ‘personas’ are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.”
Prompt for pain points and challenges: Want to go straight to the hard stuff? Ask: “Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.”
Prompt for suggestions & ideas: Rapid brainstorming, powered by attendee feedback: “Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.”
All these prompts can help you dig deep without needing to be an analytics pro. If you’re looking for more tips, see my full guide on the best questions for an event attendee survey about website usability.
How Specific analyzes qualitative event attendee survey responses
Open-ended questions with or without follow-ups: Specific AI will summarize all responses, breaking down both the main answers and the nuanced insights from follow-ups in one digestible section. You end up with the high-level picture and the “why” behind attendee feedback.
Choices with follow-ups: For questions with options (“How easy was it to navigate the agenda?”), you get a summary for follow-up answers tied to each specific choice. That means you can see, for example, what “satisfied” attendees appreciated vs. what frustrated “unsatisfied” visitors.
NPS: Specific gives you a separate themed summary for detractors, passives, and promoters—each based on follow-up comments about their NPS rating. This way, you can immediately spot what your most loyal (or disappointed) attendees are saying.
The same approach is possible in ChatGPT or any GPT tool—just more manual. You’ll need to paste filtered data for each choice or group separately and craft prompts for follow-up responses to get the same segmentation.
Dealing with context size limits in AI analysis
Every AI tool has context limits—meaning there’s a cap on how much data you can analyze in a single go. If your event attendee survey pulls in hundreds (or thousands) of long-winded responses, you’ll eventually hit this wall.
Fortunately, there are solid ways to handle this. Specific gives you two main options, and you can replicate these elsewhere:
Filtering: Only send conversations to the AI where users responded to certain key questions or gave specific answers. For example, filter to just “those who were frustrated logging in.” This keeps the dataset focused and under context limits.
Cropping: Choose individual questions (or blocks of questions) to analyze, instead of sending the full survey flow. This helps you zoom in on specific usability themes—and ensures your data fits into a single AI query.
Want to see these actions in a survey flow? Check out how context management works for AI survey response analysis in Specific.
Collaborative features for analyzing event attendee survey responses
Collaborating on survey analysis can get messy—especially with open-text feedback about event website usability, where everyone wants their own slice and perspective.
Analyze data together, in context: With Specific, you and your team can analyze survey results by chatting directly with the AI. No need to copy data around or manage email threads—just start a conversation about responses, and the AI fields your questions in real-time.
Multiple chats, clear ownership: Each chat can have its own filters and questions (for example, one chat for “Agenda usability feedback” and another for “Mobile experience complaints”). You’ll always see who set up which chat, so team leads or departments can run their own explorations in parallel.
Visibility into contributions: In collaborative mode, each AI chat shows who authored the prompt or follow-up—avatars and all. This little feature is a game-changer for research teams, because you can see at a glance which teammate explored which usability issue (and follow their thinking).
Stay in sync with context: Since every chat is tied to a specific filter, you won’t accidentally overlap efforts or lose track of findings about specific aspects of attendee website experience.
Curious how to create a survey for your use case? See this guide on easy survey creation for event attendees and website usability. If you’re ready to experiment, try the NPS survey starter for event website usability.
Create your event attendee survey about event website usability now
Start conversations that count and unlock insights with AI-driven analysis—get richer, actionable feedback from your attendees, and make your next event site better than ever.