This article will guide you through how to create a SaaS customer survey about API usability. Using Specific, you can build a high-impact survey on this topic in seconds, then launch and start learning fast.
Steps to create a survey for SaaS customers about API usability
If you want to save time, just click this link to generate a survey with Specific. Here’s the 2-step process:
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
That’s it. You don’t even need to read further—the AI will design your survey with expert-backed knowledge, and will even ask follow-up questions in real time to dig deeper into respondents’ answers, gathering rich API usability insights.
Why create an API usability survey for SaaS customers?
If you’re building API-driven SaaS, understanding your customers’ experience is non-negotiable. Why? Developer-friendly APIs can reduce development time by up to 35% by removing needless friction and supporting innovation instead of troubleshooting. Miss that, and you’re wasting your team’s time, and your customers’ budget. [1]
API usability surveys help uncover friction points—like confusing documentation, error-prone endpoints, or lack of useful examples—that block adoption.
APIs with high usability see up to 50% higher adoption rates. That’s not just about reach, it means your API gets genuinely baked into partners’ and customers' workflows, boosting stickiness and LTV. [1]
If you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing out on the customer insights that lead to real world improvements—and your competitors won’t wait.
By investing a few minutes to collect structured, honest customer feedback, you multiply your chances of building a market-dominating API and driving real usage. If you want more depth, see our article with best SaaS customer API usability questions—it’s packed with examples and tips.
What makes a good API usability survey?
Let’s get practical. A great survey (especially for SaaS customers on API usability) must:
Use clear, unbiased questions—no leading language, just crisp prompts that let people be honest.
Stay conversational—you want candid, thoughtful responses, not canned support complaints. This tone encourages users to share what actually matters to them.
Mix question types—open-ended, structured, and NPS—for both depth and comparability.
The measure of a good survey is simple: high quantity and quality of responses. You want actionable feedback, not polite checkboxes or vague one-liners.
Bad practices | Good practices |
|---|---|
Leading or confusing questions | Clear, neutral prompts |
Forms with jargon or technical assumptions | Conversational language anyone can engage with |
No follow-ups on vague answers | Dynamic probing for context (“Why?” “Can you elaborate?”) |
Long, boring forms | Short, chat-like, interactive flow |
Bottom line: If people like filling out your survey and you learn something new, you did it right.
What are question types with examples for SaaS customer survey about API usability
Choosing the right mix of question types sets you up to capture both depth and structure.
Open-ended questions let users explain issues in their own words, which is great for surfacing pain points or unexpected use cases. Use these when you want stories, not just stats. For example:
What is the biggest frustration you’ve experienced when using our API?
Can you share a moment when the API exceeded or fell short of your expectations?
Single-select multiple-choice questions make it easy to spot patterns across users and compare answers at scale. They’re perfect for quantifying pain points once you know what to look for.
Which documentation format would help you understand our API faster?
More code examples
Step-by-step tutorials
Reference docs only
Video walkthroughs
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question is the standard for tracking how likely users are to recommend your API. It’s simple, powerful, and benchmarking is easy. To create an NPS survey in seconds, try this AI NPS survey builder for API usability. Example question:
How likely are you to recommend our API to a friend or colleague, on a scale from 0 to 10?
Followup questions to uncover "the why" are indispensable anytime you want reasons behind someone’s answers. If someone says they struggle with error messages, ask for details: What error? When does it happen? That’s what unlocks actionable fixes.
What made this issue particularly frustrating?
How did you eventually solve or work around it?
If you want to dive deeper into crafting your own questions, check out our deep-dive on API usability survey question best practices.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys turn feedback into a real-time dialogue, rather than a static form. Here’s the key: instead of blasting users with a long list of questions, the AI agent chats with your respondent just like a smart researcher would. It listens, follows up, adapts tone and language, and keeps things flowing smoothly.
Compared to old-school manual survey forms, AI survey generators—like the one at Specific’s AI survey platform—make survey creation radically faster. You just describe your goal, and the AI builds out a high-quality, expert-backed survey, with logic for follow-up questions, tone of voice, and more. Here’s a quick comparison:
Manual Survey | AI-generated Survey |
|---|---|
Hours to create, prone to bias | Done in seconds, expert structure |
Rigid, static questions | Dynamic conversation that adapts to the respondent |
No smart followups | AI probes and clarifies automatically |
Painful analysis of huge text dumps | AI summarizes responses and pulls out main themes instantly |
Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? It’s simple: you learn more, faster, with less work on your end. Your respondents get a smooth, chat-like experience so they share more detail, and you never need to wrangle spreadsheet exports or dig through cryptic data by hand. For a closer look at the workflow, read our guide to analyzing API usability survey results.
If you want a best-in-class conversational survey experience, Specific leads the pack—eliminating both the friction for your users and the manual analysis for your team. Try an AI survey example or build your own in minutes to see the difference.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions are where the magic happens—they turn bland answers into actionable insights. Specific’s AI follow-up question engine listens to every answer and probes intelligently, just like a human expert, but at scale and in real time.
Automated followups mean you’re not left with vague responses that you’d otherwise have to chase down via email—saving massive time. They also make the conversation feel natural, so your SaaS customers actually want to share what’s on their mind. Let’s look at an example:
SaaS customer: “The documentation is confusing.”
AI follow-up: “Can you share which part was unclear or where you got stuck?”
How many followups to ask? Generally, 2-3 follow-up questions is enough to clarify intent and capture context. It’s smart to let respondents skip to the next question once you have what you need—Specific has a setting for this, keeping the experience both thorough and respectful of people’s time.
This makes it a conversational survey—one that adapts, probes, and learns in real time rather than just collecting surface-level data.
AI survey response analysis is easy even when you gather tons of free-text replies. With Specific, you can analyze every answer using AI or even chat with your survey results. All those text blocks suddenly become simple, actionable intelligence instead of a manual processing headache.
Automated followup questions are a new paradigm. If you haven’t tried this yet, generate your first conversational survey and see how much richer your feedback can be.
See this API usability survey example now
Ready to see real API usability insights? Create your own SaaS customer survey with smart follow-ups and effortless AI analysis, and get more actionable feedback than ever with Specific.