The design stage is the conversational half of a Bridge study—the part you drive. You and Skipper work through four steps in order, and when they're all done your study is priced, drafted, and ready to pay for. This article explains the shape of that work and where your input actually goes.
In This Article
The Four Steps
Every study's design stage has the same four steps. All four cards are on the canvas from the start as placeholders marked To Do; Skipper opens each step as it reaches it, and the card fills in as you talk.
| Step | What gets settled |
|---|---|
| Methodology | What kind of test this is, your objectives, your research questions, and what you're putting under test. |
| Targeting | Who you're asking—demographics, quotas, and your screening questions. |
| Sample size & Budget | How many respondents, and what it costs. This is where the quote is agreed. |
| Survey Draft | The questionnaire itself, polished, with a live preview of how respondents will see it. |
Alongside them you'll see a Stimuli card (called Names on a naming study), which belongs to the methodology step—that's where your images or wordings live.
Why That Order
The order isn't arbitrary, and it explains something that surprises people: your survey gets written twice.
Skipper writes a first version of the questionnaire just before the first quote, because a price has to be based on a real survey rather than a guess at one. You then agree the quote. Only after that does the draft step do the slow work of polishing the questionnaire the quote was built on. If polishing changes the survey enough to move the price, Skipper tells you both figures and asks before going ahead.
So if you look at the Survey Draft card early and find something already in it, nothing has gone wrong—that's the version the quote was built on.
What You Change Yourself
This is the most useful thing to know about Bridge, and it's not obvious from looking at the screen.
The cards are for reading, not for typing into. Methodology, Targeting, Sample size & Budget, and Survey Draft all show you what's been decided without letting you edit it in place. They're read-only by design. (In the survey preview, right-clicking a question gives you a shortcut that starts a chat message about it—see Your Survey Draft and Preview.)
Stimuli is the exception. Expand that card and it takes direct input—upload your images, or type and paste your wordings, right on the card. Skipper is told about your edit and updates anything that depends on it. See Adding Stimuli to Your Study.
Everything else changes because you asked for it in the conversation. Want a different age range? Say so. Want a question reworded, a scale changed, a concept dropped? Say so. Skipper makes the change and the card updates.
💡 Tip: This isn't a limitation dressed up as a feature. Because every change goes through the conversation, your chat ends up being a complete record of why the study looks the way it does—useful months later when someone asks why you screened the way you did.
One thing you can always edit directly: if you created the study, its title, at any point in its life.
Moving Around the Canvas
The stage rail beside the canvas shows your study's stages in order—Design, Fielding, then Report—as numbered circles, with an arrow on the current one. Click any stage to go there—looking around is never gated, so you can step back to Design while a survey is fielding.
When the canvas panel is narrow (for example, with the chat open on a smaller screen), the rail becomes a drop-down above the cards that labels each stage Current, Done, In progress, or Not started.
Cards come in two sizes. Collapsed, a card shows a summary; click it and it expands to the full surface.
Each card carries a status pill—To Do, Needs work, Done, or a word for the work in progress, such as Drafting, Pricing, or Checking reach. A card with no pill is simply being worked on with nothing to report. A lock icon means the card can't be changed right now.
When Design Is Done
When all four steps read Done, your study moves to Ready to Launch and the canvas moves to the Fielding stage, where the checkout card lives. That card was there from the very beginning with the note Finish design to launch your study, so you could see it coming. Bridge first runs a quick check (the pill reads Validating); if something needs fixing, the study goes back to Design and Skipper reopens that step.
Design isn't a door that locks behind you. Ask for a change after the design closes and Skipper reopens whichever step owns it—the study drops back to Design and returns to Ready to Launch when the change settles. What does lock, permanently, is payment: once a charge clears, every design step is frozen. Design is also locked while a payment is processing, and unlocks again if the payment fails.
⚠️ Note: Changing who you're targeting after you've accepted the quote means accepting a new quote—Skipper re-prices first.
Switching to a different type of concept test part-way through is a bigger move than it looks. The draft step follows the methodology, so switching it swaps the draft's shape too. Your screening questions survive the change—they live with the audience, not the questionnaire—but expect the draft to be rebuilt.