Once responses start coming in, how you choose to visualise your data can shape how easily you spot patterns, compare groups, and communicate insights. The results dashboard offers several ways to view the same data, depending on what you are trying to understand.
Choosing which data to analyse
Before looking at visualisations, decide which responses you want to include.
If your survey was sent:
across multiple waves, or
to multiple audiences
you can choose to analyse:
a single wave or audience, or
aggregated responses across all selected data
By default, the overview shows results from the most recent wave and all audiences. You can adjust this depending on whether you want a point-in-time view or a broader picture.
How to view your results
Overview view
The overview is the default way to explore results. It simply shows all answer options and their results in our standard visualisation.
In this view, you can do a few things that you can't do on other views such as:
clicking on an answer to filter results to respondents who selected it
reviewing open text answers
The overview is useful for quick exploration, sense-checking responses, and working directly with raw results before creating comparisons or visual summaries.
Chart view
Charts are useful when you want to compare results visually or highlight differences clearly.
In chart view, you can:
switch between chart types such as column, bar, pie, stacked, or line charts
add splits to compare responses across demographics, segments, or waves
Edit your charts to make the viusalisation clearer or add your own brand colours
Charts are particularly effective for:
comparing groups side by side
tracking change over time
presenting results to stakeholders
Crosstab view
Crosstabs present results in a table format.
They are useful when:
you want precise comparisons across multiple variables
visual charts become too dense or hard to read
you need to analyse intersections between groups
Crosstabs can include the same splits as charts and are often used for deeper analysis rather than presentation.
Using splits across views
Both charts and crosstabs support splits, which allow you to break results down by:
demographics
answers to questions
segments
waves
audiences
Splits help you compare how different groups respond to the same question. The same split logic applies across both chart and crosstab views.
Page-level display settings
There are several page-level settings that affect how results are shown.
From the options menu, you can control:
whether results are shown as values, percentages, or both
how answers are ordered (for example by result or draft order)
how percentages are calculated when forwarded answers are used
which language results are displayed in for multi-language surveys
You can also apply a theme to charts to update colours consistently across a page.
Creating charts with Compass
In addition to creating charts manually, you can use Compass to help generate charts using natural language descriptions.
On Boards, you can describe what you want to see, for example:
a comparison between waves
a chart split by a specific demographic
a trend over time
Compass can then:
create charts based on your description
add them to a board
name and organise charts as part of a report
This can be a quick way to explore different views of the data or draft stakeholder-ready summaries.
As with all Compass outputs, it’s important to review the underlying charts and settings to ensure the visualisation matches your intent and uses the correct data and splits.