75 Open-Ended Questions Examples, Sorted by the Job They Do

A question is only good if it earns its place against a decision you are trying to make, which is why a pile of open-ended questions with no order to them is close to useless. So this list is sorted by the job each question does: understanding why people buy, testing a product before you launch it, working out why someone left, reading the room on a sales call.

Below are 75 open-ended questions worth asking, grouped by that job. Before the list, the two-minute version of when an open-ended question beats a closed one and when it does not, because the honest answer is “less often than you think”. After it, how to write your own, how to read a few hundred replies without drowning, and a template you can copy today.

This post is the deep dive on one format. If you want the broader set, covering rating scales, multiple choice, screening and the rest alongside these, that is the survey questions list.

What counts as an open-ended question

An open-ended question is one the respondent answers in their own words. There is no menu. “What nearly stopped you buying today?” is open-ended. “Did anything nearly stop you buying? Yes or no” is closed. The first invites a sentence, a story, a reason. The second invites a tick.

That difference is the whole point. As the Nielsen Norman Group puts it after decades of user research, open-ended questions produce deeper and often unexpected insights, while closed questions give you clarification and clean numbers but nothing you did not already think to ask about. When you write a closed question, you are quietly assuming you already know the full set of possible answers. An open-ended question is you admitting you might be wrong, and asking the customer to fill the gap.

Open-ended vs closed questions: when to use each

Here is the trade-off nobody selling you a survey tool likes to dwell on. Open-ended questions are expensive to answer. On Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, closed questions go unanswered only 1 to 2 per cent of the time, while open-ended questions average around 18 per cent, with some individual questions passing 50 per cent. Typing a real answer takes effort, and a fair share of people simply skip it.

There is a subtler cost too. When people are tired or rushing, they satisfice: they give the first acceptable answer rather than the best one. Survey methodologists Jon Krosnick and Stanley Presser have shown this cuts both ways. On closed questions people grab whichever listed option looks good enough, so the options you offer shape the result. On open-ended questions the tired respondent writes “good” and moves on. Neither format is truthful by default. Both reward a well-designed question.

Satisficing is a fatigue problem, so the fixes are all about spending the respondent’s attention early. Keep the survey short enough that nobody is tired by the end. Put your one genuinely important open-ended question first, while they still have the energy to write a sentence. And anchor it to a specific moment rather than a general impression, because “what almost stopped you buying today?” is answerable in six words while “what do you think of our store?” invites the shrug. If you only have one open-ended question’s worth of goodwill, and you usually do, spend it deliberately.

So the rule is simple. Use closed questions when you need to count and compare across a lot of people: how many rate delivery as slow, which of three names scores highest, what share would buy at a given price. Use open-ended questions when you need the reason, the wording, or the thing you did not anticipate. This is the same open-versus-closed choice that sits underneath every one of the market research methods worth running, just at the level of a single question.

In practice the best surveys use both. Closed questions do the counting. One to three sharp open-ended questions, placed where they earn their keep, do the explaining.

One placement rule is worth more than the rest put together, and it is free: ask your open-ended questions before your closed ones. Pew deliberately puts them near the start of a survey, because the moment you show someone a list of options you have told them what kind of answer you expect, and they will hand it back to you. Ask “what almost stopped you buying?” before you offer them your four favourite theories about why, or you will simply measure your own assumptions.

The 75 examples, sorted by the job they do

Every question below is phrased to invite a real answer, not a yes or a no. Lift them as they are, or swap the specifics for your product and category.

One thing to notice as you read: these questions do not all belong in the same place. Each block is marked survey or conversation, and the distinction matters more than it looks. In an unattended survey, an open-ended question is competing with the close button, which is where that 18 per cent nonresponse figure comes from, so you get one or two and they need to be short. In a moderated conversation, an interview, a usability session, a sales call, a human being is waiting for the answer, nobody skips, and you can ask a broad question and follow it wherever it goes. Asking a survey question in an interview wastes the format. Asking an interview question in a survey gets you silence.

Why people buy: purchase motivation (survey)

1. What were you hoping this would fix when you bought it?
2. Why did you choose us over the alternative you were looking at?
3. What finally tipped you into buying today rather than waiting?
4. What almost stopped you from buying?
5. How would you describe this product to a friend who had never heard of it?
6. What was going on in your life that made you start looking for something like this?
7. If we did not exist, what would you be doing instead?
8. What is the one thing this needs to do well for it to be worth the money?

Product and concept feedback (survey)

9. What is your honest first reaction to this?
10. What would make you choose this over what you use now?
11. What feels missing or unfinished to you?
12. Who do you picture actually using this, and when?
13. What would you expect to pay for this, and why that figure?
14. If you could change one thing about it, what would it be and why?
15. What is confusing or unclear on first look?
16. What nearly identical thing have you tried before, and how did that go?

Post-purchase and customer experience (survey)

17. How did the product compare to what you expected before it arrived?
18. What was the best part of buying from us?
19. Where did we make things harder than they needed to be?
20. What almost made you abandon the order partway through?
21. What would have made this a five-out-of-five experience?
22. What did you tell other people about us, if anything?
23. What nearly made you shop somewhere else instead?
24. What is one thing we could do that would earn your next order?

Why they did not buy, and why they leave (survey)

25. What were you looking for that you did not find here?
26. What stopped you from completing your order?
27. What would have needed to be true for you to buy today?
28. What made you decide to cancel?
29. What were you using us for, and what changed?
30. Where did we stop being worth it for you?
31. What did the product or service you switched to do better?
32. If you came back, what would have to be different?

Pricing and value (survey)

33. When you saw the price, what went through your mind?
34. What would make this feel like clearly good value to you?
35. What did you compare our price against?
36. What would you happily pay more for?
37. What here feels overpriced for what you get?
38. What would make you hesitate at this price?
39. How do you decide something like this is worth it?

Brand, positioning and messaging (survey)

40. In your own words, what do we actually do?
41. What did you think we were before you looked closely?
42. What made you trust us enough to buy?
43. What would make you recommend us without being asked?
44. Which part of how we describe ourselves rings true, and which does not?
45. What kind of company do we come across as?
46. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of us?
47. What would you warn a friend about before they bought?

Website and product UX (conversation)

48. Walk me through what you were trying to do just now.
49. What did you expect to happen when you clicked that?
50. Where did you get stuck or have to stop and think?
51. What were you looking for that you could not find?
52. If a button here could do anything, what would you want it to do?
53. What made you hesitate before you finished?
54. What would you tell us to fix first?
55. Tell me about the last time you tried to do this somewhere else.

Customer support and service (survey)

56. What were you trying to sort out when you got in touch?
57. What would have let you solve this without contacting us at all?
58. What did we get right in how we handled it?
59. Where did we let you down?
60. What did you expect us to do that we did not?
61. How did the way we responded make you feel about buying again?
62. What is the one change that would have saved you the hassle?

Sales and discovery calls (conversation)

63. What made you take this call today?
64. What does a good outcome from this look like for you?
65. What have you already tried, and where did it fall short?
66. What happens if you do nothing and leave things as they are?
67. Who else is affected by this problem inside your business?
68. What would need to be true for you to move forward?
69. What is your biggest worry about a decision like this?

Rapport and everyday conversation (conversation)

70. What have you been spending most of your time on lately?
71. How did you end up doing what you do now?
72. What is something you have changed your mind about recently?
73. What is going well for you that we have not talked about?
74. What would make the next few months a success for you?
75. What have I not asked that I should have?

How to write an open-ended question that actually works

A weak open-ended question is worse than a good closed one, because it costs the respondent effort and gives you mush in return. Five rules keep them sharp.

Be specific. “What do you think of our website?” invites a shrug. “What were you trying to do on our site just before you gave up?” invites a story you can act on. Narrow the question to a moment or a decision.

Ask one thing at a time. “What did you like and dislike about the checkout?” is two questions wearing one coat, and you will get half an answer to each. Split them.

Stay neutral. “What did you love about the new pack?” assumes love. “What is your honest reaction to the new pack?” does not put the answer in their mouth. Krosnick and Presser’s work is full of examples where the framing quietly manufactures the result.

Start with what, why or how. Questions that open with “did”, “is” or “have” pull towards yes or no. Questions that open with “what”, “why” or “how” pull towards a sentence.

Use few, and place them well. Because open-ended questions are the ones people skip, do not stack six of them. Pick the two or three where you truly need the customer’s own words, and put the most important one early, before your closed questions have coloured their thinking.

Here is the same intent, written badly and then well:

Badly: “Are you happy with your purchase?” You will learn almost nothing, because the honest answer is “yes” and it tells you why nothing.

Well: “What were you hoping this would do for you, and how has it measured up so far?” Now you get the job they hired the product for and the gap between promise and reality, in language you can put straight into your product page.

How to read a few hundred open-ended answers without drowning

This is where most teams give up. Closed data counts itself. Two hundred paragraphs of free text just sit there, so they get skimmed once and forgotten. That is a waste, because the free text is the only part that tells you why.

The method researchers use is called coding. Read a sample of thirty or forty answers first, purely to learn the recurring themes and the words people keep using. Turn those into a short list of tags, say six to ten, then go through every answer and tag it against them. Now you can count: “a third of the people who cancelled mentioned delivery times”, which is a closed insight you extracted from open text. Keep the sharpest verbatim quotes to carry the reasons and the exact phrasing, because “it turned up looking nothing like the photos” lands harder in a meeting than “product accuracy: 34 per cent”.

The catch has always been that coding by hand is slow, so the free text gets skipped. That is the part that has genuinely changed. AI tools can now do a first pass of tagging on hundreds of open-ended answers in minutes, grouping them into themes and pulling representative quotes, leaving you to sanity-check rather than start from a blank page. It is worth reading a chunk yourself regardless, because the outliers, the weird one-off answer that turns out to be the real story, are exactly what a summary smooths away.

There is one more limit worth naming. Open-ended questions can only be asked of people you already have: customers, visitors, a panel. If you are still pre-launch, or weighing an idea before you have committed stock or ad budget, there is nobody to survey yet. That is the gap TestFeed is built for. You can put a product, a pack, a claim, an in-context price or a concept in front of your target shopper and get back a purchase-intent read, the shoppers’ reasons in their own words, and a clear next move, in days rather than weeks. Treat it as what it is: a directional, pre-spend signal to decide which ideas deserve a real launch, not a market forecast or a guaranteed sales number. Once you have real customers, point the open-ended questions above straight at them.

A survey you can copy today

If you want a short post-purchase survey that mostly counts itself but still tells you why, this structure works. Two closed questions to measure, two open-ended to explain, in this order:

First, open-ended, before anything anchors them: “What almost stopped you buying today?” Second, closed: “How would you rate your experience, from 1 to 5?” Third, closed: “Which of these best describes why you bought? [your top four reasons, plus Other].” Fourth, open-ended: “What is the one thing we could do to make this better?”

Four questions, thirty seconds, and you walk away with a number you can track over time and two piles of verbatim answers that tell you what the number means. That is the shape of a good post-purchase survey. For the attribution version, aimed at working out where customers actually heard about you, the same principle applies: one well-worded question at the point of purchase beats a wall of them a week later.

If you take one thing from this, let it be the order of operations. Decide the question you need answered, choose closed or open on whether you need to count or to understand, then write the sharpest possible version and ask as few as you can get away with. The list above gives you the raw material. The discipline is asking less, and asking better.

Frequently asked questions

What is an open-ended question?

An open-ended question is one the respondent answers in their own words, rather than choosing from a fixed set of options. “Why did you pick this product over the others?” is open-ended. “Did you compare it to others? Yes or no” is closed. Open-ended questions collect language, reasons and detail you did not anticipate, which is exactly what a list of tick-boxes cannot give you.

What are some examples of open-ended questions?

Good ones are specific and start with what, why or how. “What almost stopped you buying today?” “Why did you choose us over the alternative you were looking at?” “How would you describe this product to a friend?” “What were you hoping this would fix?” “If you could change one thing about it, what would it be and why?” Each asks for a reason or a story rather than a yes, a no or a rating.

What is the difference between open and closed questions?

A closed question offers a fixed set of answers: yes or no, a rating, a pick-from-a-list. It is fast to answer and easy to count, but the answer can only ever be one of the options you thought of. An open-ended question lets the respondent reply freely, so it surfaces reasons and wording you would never have listed, at the cost of more effort to answer and more work to analyse.

How many open-ended questions should a survey have?

Few. Open-ended questions are the most effort to answer, so on Pew Research Center’s panel they go unanswered around 18 per cent of the time against 1 to 2 per cent for closed questions. Use closed questions to do the counting and place one to three well-aimed open-ended questions where you genuinely need the “why” in the customer’s own words.

How do you analyse open-ended survey responses?

Read a sample first to learn the language people actually use, then group answers into a handful of recurring themes and tag each response against them, a method survey researchers call coding. Count how often each theme appears so you can say “a third of buyers mentioned delivery speed”, and keep the sharpest verbatim quotes for the reasons and the wording. AI tools can now do the first pass of this tagging on hundreds of answers in minutes.