Build and Edit Your Study in the Studio

The studio chat builds and edits your AI-moderated study for you: describe what you want in plain language, and it changes the study directly.

​

What Is the Studio Chat?

When you open the studio from an AI Moderated Interview or AI Moderated Prototype Test, the Setup tab shows your study as a canvas: the steps participants go through, in order. The chat sits beside that canvas. Instead of filling in forms, you tell the chat what you want, for example “add a rating question after the second task” or “don’t ask more than two follow-ups on the pricing question”, and it makes the change. Interviews and prototype tests are built the same way. A prototype test is a study that includes a Prototype test step, with tasks and questions inside it. Everything in this article applies to both unless it says otherwise.

​

Why It Matters

Build a full study from a sentence, or from the guide you already have. Describe your research goal, or upload an existing research guide, and the chat drafts the plan, the questions, and the flow. Change anything without hunting for the setting. Question wording, answer options, follow-up limits, prototype links, and moderator instructions are all one request away. See every change as it happens. Edits land on the canvas right away, and the chat tells you exactly what it changed.

​

How the Chat Works

1. From your study’s AI Moderated Interview step in Great Question, click Open studio. You land on the Setup tab with the chat open beside the canvas.
2. Type what you want, or upload a research guide (see Start From a Research Guide below). You can describe the whole study at once or make one change at a time.
3. While it works, the chat shows Thinking…, then a collapsible Thought step with its reasoning. Open it to see how it interpreted your request.
4. The chat applies the change and confirms it in plain language, for example: “Added right after the mic setup, before the prototype: ‘How would you describe your experience with [topic]?’ Rest of the flow is unchanged.” After larger changes it also draws the study as a flowchart in the chat so you can check the order.
5. Keep going in the same conversation until the study is right. There is no separate save step.

​

Start From a Research Guide

If you already have a discussion guide, test script, or research brief, you don’t need to retype it. Upload it to the chat and it builds the study from the document, carrying over your goals, questions, and tasks.

1. In the chat box, click + and choose Upload document. You can also drag the file into the chat box.
2. Add a short message saying what you want, for example “Turn this guide into an AI-moderated interview” or “Build a prototype test from this script, using https://example.com/prototype as the prototype”.
3. Send the message. The chat drafts the study on the canvas and tells you what it built.
4. Review the result and refine it in the same conversation, the same way you would any other change.

The chat accepts PDF, plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md), and images (PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP), up to 25 MB per file. Word documents and Google Docs aren’t supported directly, so export them as a PDF first. Images work too, for example a screenshot of a guide that lives in another tool. The chat reads the image to build the study; it doesn’t add the image to what participants see.

​

Working With the Chat

A few things make the chat faster to work with:

• Edit this step in chat. Select a step on the canvas and click Edit this step in chat. The chat knows which step you mean, so you can just say “make this shorter” or “add a follow-up about cost”.
• Clickable questions. When the chat needs more detail, it may ask up to four short questions as a card you can click through instead of typing answers.
• Several chats per study. The chat picker in the top bar lists the study’s five most recent chats, named from their first message, and includes New chat. Coming back to a study reopens its latest chat.
• Closing the chat. Close it from its header, or drag its resize handle all the way left, to give the canvas the full width. Reopening picks up the same conversation.
• Resending a message. If you edit and resend an earlier message, the chat discards the replies after it and answers again. Changes it already made to the study stay in place.

​

What You Can Edit

​

Study details

​

Steps

You can ask the chat to add, remove, reorder, or rewrite any step. Every step has a title and description. Here is everything else you can set on each type. Answer options need at least two choices, with no blanks or duplicates. For a task, you can also ask for a step that runs just before the task begins or just after it’s completed, for example a quick rating question as soon as the participant finishes.

​

Moderator settings and follow-up questions

Every question, prototype test, and task can have its own moderator settings. These control how the AI moderator behaves on that step: Settings on a Prototype test step apply to every task and question inside it, so one set of moderator settings on the prototype test is usually all a prototype study needs. How follow-ups work. The moderator treats Max probes as a ceiling, not a target. It only follows up when an answer needs more depth, and it won’t probe an answer that already explains the why. As it gets close to the limit, it starts wrapping up the step. Asking a participant to clarify something, or acknowledging what they said, doesn’t count as a probe. The moderator never reads its goal or instructions aloud to participants.

​

What the Chat Can’t Do

Some things aren’t part of a studio study today. If you ask for one, the chat will tell you it can’t. The chat also checks every change against a few rules before saving it. Every study needs a Device permissions step and ends with an End step, and tasks must sit inside a prototype test. If a change would break one of these rules, the chat adjusts it or explains why it can’t. If you ask for a question that could lead participants toward an answer, the chat suggests a more neutral version once. If you’d still like your original wording, confirm it and the chat uses it as written.

​

Editing a Live Study

You can keep editing after your study is launched, and changes apply to participants who start after that. Be careful with deletions.

​

Best Practices

Start with the goal, not the questions. Tell the chat what decision the research will inform. It writes better questions, and the moderator asks better follow-ups, when the goal is specific. Upload your guide instead of summarizing it. If you already have a discussion guide or test script, the full document gives the chat more to work with than a summary. Make one change per message when it matters. Large requests work, but small ones make it easier to check the confirmation and spot anything the chat interpreted differently than you meant. Use Edit this step in chat for precise edits. Pointing the chat at a step avoids ambiguity when several questions look alike. Set probes on purpose. Use 0 for simple factual questions, and 2 or 3 where you want the “why” behind an answer. Preview after every round of edits. Preview runs the study exactly as a participant sees it, including the live AI moderation, without recording anything or saving results.

​

Troubleshooting

---

Still need help? Contact us at support@greatquestion.co — median response time is 19 minutes during support hours.