A study is the unit of work in Bridge—one piece of research, from the first thing you say to Skipper through to the finished report. This article explains how a study is put together, how to read what's on screen, and what happens to it at each phase.
In This Article
- What a Study Is
- Stages, Steps, and Cards
- Reading a Card
- The Life of a Study
- Who Can See and Edit It
- Renaming, Deleting, and Restoring
What a Study Is
Every study starts from a template you pick when you create it—a concept test, a pricing study, and so on. The template decides the study's shape: which phases it has and what work sits inside each one. That shape is fixed at creation and doesn't change underneath you, even if the template itself is updated later.
The template also gives your study its identity: the coloured gem you'll recognise it by in the dock, and its icon. Studies made from the same template share a colour but get their own outline, so a column of them is still tellable apart.
💡 Tip: Your organization can arrange the template picker to suit how your team works, so what you see may differ from a colleague in another team—and the same template can be labelled differently in different folders. Your study keeps whatever name and icon you were actually shown when you picked it.
Stages, Steps, and Cards
A study has three levels, and you'll hear all three named.
- A stage is a top-level phase: design, fielding, report.
- A step is a unit of work inside a stage. The design stage has four—Methodology, Targeting, Sample size & Budget, and Survey Draft. The fielding stage has four of its own—Checkout, Collection, Data Cleaning, and Analysis.
- A card is how a step shows up on the canvas: a tile you can read and expand. Most cards are read-only—see What You Change Yourself.
Skipper works one step at a time and opens each one as it reaches it, so the canvas fills in as your conversation progresses rather than confronting you with everything at once. Cards for steps that haven't started yet stay visible but greyed, each one naming what will eventually go in it.
The stage rail beside the canvas lists the stages and marks each one Current, Done, In progress, or Not started. Those hints come from the stage itself, not from where it sits, so stepping back to look at Design still shows you a fielding in progress. You can click any stage to go there—looking around is never gated.
Screening Questions Belong to Targeting
One thing catches people out: your screening questions—the prequalification questions a respondent answers before the survey body—are part of your audience, not your survey draft. They're written and confirmed at the targeting step, and they're joined onto the front of your survey when it's built.
This is why asking for a screener change later in the conversation reopens the targeting step rather than editing the draft in place. It isn't Skipper losing its place—it's going back to where those questions actually live.
Reading a Card
Each card carries a status pill in its header telling you where that piece of work stands:
| Pill | What it means |
|---|---|
| To Do | Not started. The card's body tells you what belongs in it. |
| Working | Skipper is on it now. A percentage appears when there's one to show. |
| Needs work | Something failed, or Skipper has flagged the card for another pass. It doesn't say why—check the card itself. |
| Done | Finished. |
A card with no pill at all is simply being worked on with nothing to report—that's normal.
What You Change Yourself
Cards are mostly there to be read and checked, not typed into. Stimuli is the exception—that's where you upload your images, or type and paste your wordings, directly on the card.
Everything else on the canvas is read-only by design: Targeting, Sample size & Budget, and Survey Draft all show you what's been decided without letting you edit it in place. To change any of them, ask Skipper in the conversation.
When you do add stimuli, Skipper notices and picks the change up on its next turn. You don't have to tell it.
The Life of a Study
A study's status follows its work—you never set it by hand. The full list is in Bridge Terminology; here's what actually happens at each turn.
Design
The conversational phase, and the only one you drive. Skipper walks the four design steps in order, and the order is deliberate: your quote is agreed before the survey gets polished, so the price is settled before the slow work starts. When every design step is done, the study reads Ready to Launch.
Checkout
The checkout card is visible from the very beginning, greyed, so you can see it coming while the design is still being built. It opens once the design stage closes.
Your study keeps reading Ready to Launch for the whole of checkout—including while your payment is processing. Closing checkout without finishing it loses nothing—the checkout card stays on the canvas, and you can open it again whenever you're ready. See Checking Out and Paying for Your Study.
Once your payment clears, two things happen for good: every earlier stage locks, and the checkout card becomes read-only. It stays openable, because that's where your receipt lives.
⚠️ Note: Paying completes your order, but it doesn't start collection on its own—our panel team reviews every Bridge survey first. Your study will read Fielding while the response count is still zero, and that's expected. You don't need to do anything, and you won't be charged again.
After Launch
Fielding, cleaning, and analysis run themselves. Nobody drives them—each card opens when its turn comes and closes when the work behind it finishes. The study moves from Fielding to Analyzing on its own, then to Report once your report is written. Data Cleaning closes as soon as collection does, so you won't see a separate cleaning stretch. See After Your Study Launches.
Stopping Early
If you own a study that's collecting, you can stop it from its row menu in All studies. Some surveys have a guaranteed delivery window first; until it ends, Stop study is greyed out with the exact moment it unlocks. Nothing you do brings that moment forward—only the clock.
Stopping a paid study refunds the responses that weren't delivered and ends the study at Refund, which is final. No report is written from the responses collected so far. See Stopping a Study Early.
Who Can See and Edit It
Seeing a study and changing it are two separate questions with two different answers.
Who can see it follows your normal aytm visibility rules for the study's account and team. A study in a confidential team is visible only to that team's members.
Who can edit it is narrower: only the person who created the study. Everyone else who can see it gets a read-only canvas, and that includes team admins and account admins. There's no override role—this is one place where Bridge is deliberately stricter than the rest of aytm.
If you can see a study but can't change it, you have two routes: copy it, which gives you a study of your own to work on, or ask the owner to hand it over to you. See Cloning a Study in Bridge.
New studies belong to whichever team the header picker is on when you create them, and a study's team never moves afterwards.
Renaming, Deleting, and Restoring
Renaming. The title is the one thing you can change at any point in a study's life, including after its report is finished. There are three ways to rename a study: open All studies from the header and rename it from its row; click the title in the study panel header (a pencil appears on hover); or ask Skipper to rename it for you. Renaming isn't offered on a teammate's study.
Deleting. To delete a study, choose Delete study from its row menu and confirm. Deleting hides the study along with every conversation attached to it, yours and your teammates'. Nothing else changes: no responses are removed, and the invoice stays in your transactions. Only the study's owner, a team admin, or an account admin can delete it. A study that's currently Fielding, Cleaning, or Analyzing can't be deleted because there's a survey still working behind it, so Delete study won't appear in its menu until it's stopped. If you delete the study you're currently looking at, Bridge takes you back to the welcome page rather than leaving you on a dead screen. The same happens if you undock it.
Restoring. Deleting is a hide, not an erase, but undoing it isn't self-serve. An aytm admin can restore a deleted study whole, conversations included. Contact support if you need one back. If a teammate had already deleted their own conversation on that study before you deleted it, it stays deleted and doesn't come back on a restore.