The Survey Draft card holds your questionnaire and shows it to you the way a respondent will see it, without launching anything. It's the last design step and the one worth the most careful read before you pay.
In This Article
- What's on the Card
- The Plan, and Jumping Around
- Concepts in a Loop
- Sharing and Exporting
- Changing the Draft
- States You'll See
What's on the Card
Expand the card and it splits in two. On the left is the plan—your survey's sections in order. On the right is the live preview, with a row of action chips above it.
Under the card's title you'll find the summary that matters most: your question count and estimated length, for example 12Q · ~6 min.
The preview is capped at the width a respondent sees on a desktop and centred, so you're never reading questions wider than your respondents will get.
The right pane has a Description | Preview switcher. Preview is the survey itself. Description gives you the selected section's title, its goal, its question count, and a note on its purpose—with a copy button for the purpose text. Switching between them keeps your place.
The Plan, and Jumping Around
Each section in the plan shows its title and a count badge—a question count such as 8Q for an ordinary section, or concepts × questions such as 3×4 for a looped one. A section's goal is in the Description view.
Click a section and the preview jumps to that section's first question. From there you can walk forward through the survey in the real respondent order.
💡 Tip: Your screening questions appear as their own Screening section at the top of the plan and ahead of the survey body in the preview, because that's where respondents meet them. They count toward the question total. They're written at the Targeting step, not here—see Your Audience and Screening Questions.
Concepts in a Loop
Concept tests usually ask the same block of questions about each concept in turn. The plan shows that as a single Loop card with one tile per concept, laid out in a row. Looped sections are the only ones in the plan that show your concepts.
If you have more concepts than fit, the row starts at the selected concept and an accent +N count opens a searchable picker across all of them. A concept with no image shows a placeholder mark—hover it to see its name.
When the concepts are words rather than pictures (a naming study, for example), the same row appears as numbered names without tiles.
Sharing and Exporting
The action chips above the preview give you three ways to take the draft out of Bridge:
- Download Docx—your questionnaire as a Word document, for offline review and mark-up.
- Copy preview link—a link that opens the preview in a full browser tab. Useful for a second monitor, or for sending to a colleague for a read.
- Open preview—the same thing, in a new tab now.
On a narrow screen the chips shorten to Docx, Copy link, and Open. The full-tab preview includes aytm's preview toolbar, so it offers a few more viewing options than the preview on the card.
Before launch, you can also reach the preview from the All studies table: a study's row carries an eye (Preview in aytm) that opens the same full-tab preview as Open preview.
⚠️ Note: A preview link opens without a sign-in, and it doesn't expire—anyone with the link can open it, and after launch it shows the live survey. Share it only with people you'd show unreleased work to.
Changing the Draft
You don't edit questions on the card—you ask Skipper, in the conversation, and the card follows.
There's a shortcut: right-click a question or an answer option in the preview and choose Edit this question (for example, Change Q3). That starts a message to Skipper in the chat box about that exact item.
When the draft changes, the preview refreshes in place and usually keeps your place and the answers you'd typed while testing. If the question you were on was removed, it goes back to the start. Editing your targeting refreshes it too, since your screening questions are part of the survey.
Worth reading closely before you pay:
- Question wording and answer options, in the preview rather than in the chat summary.
- The estimated length. Longer surveys cost more, so it's worth asking Skipper about.
- That every concept is shown in the loop. The order of concepts can change from one preview session to the next, so clicking a concept tile takes you to that position in the loop, which may show a different concept.
States You'll See
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| The plan, but no preview | Your survey's shape has been decided but the questionnaire hasn't been written yet. A normal state to sit in while you settle parameters—not an error. The chips and switcher appear once there's a survey to show. |
| "Preparing a survey…" | The preview is loading. It can take a moment the first time you expand the card. A shared preview link opened before the survey is written shows the same message. |
| "Updating the draft…" | Skipper is rebuilding the questionnaire. You keep reading the previous version until the new one lands. |
| "Refresh failed · Retry" | An update couldn't load. What's on screen is the last good version—press Retry. |
| "Preview unavailable" | The preview couldn't load at all. Collapse the card and expand it again to retry. |
Once a preview has loaded, Bridge keeps the last version you could read rather than replacing it with an error, so a draft that breaks mid-edit doesn't leave you with a blank card.
⚠️ Note: If the length in the chat and the length on the card disagree, mention it to Skipper so it can recheck. Your price is based on the length in your quote.