Segments

Overview

A segment is a named group of participants that you define, so you can read your results one group against another.

Anyone aged 18 to 34. Everyone who rated your product 8 or above. Everyone who ranked Brand A first. Each of those is a segment, and selecting it in Insights splits your numbers into a column per group — so you can see where the enthusiasm sits.

Segments pick out people, not individual answers — which is why a screening question can shape the results of a product survey.

Segments combine people. Product Groups combine products. Use both and you get one column per segment per product.

Where to Find Segments

Go to Insights, open the Tools menu and choose Segments. It's on every project from the moment it's created, so you can set your segments up long before results arrive. There's a shortcut too: a Create Segments link sits beneath every Segments and Filter selector in the sidebar, and opens the same page in a new tab.

Throughout, Products are the labels on a physical product study — on a concept study they read Concepts; on a survey-only study, Surveys.

The Segments You Start With

Projects on Highlight's US community arrive with premade demographic segments covering generation, pronouns and region. They arrive READY and sit at the top of your list.

They're also the quickest way to learn the builder: open one to see how a condition is built, then Duplicate it and reshape the copy into your own. If your list is empty, nothing is broken — build your first from scratch.

Building a Segment

1. Click New Segment. It's created immediately, named "New Segment".
2. Rename it in Name of Segment — up to 30 characters. This is the label you'll see on your results.
3. Build your first condition (below).
4. Switch the toggle at the top from DRAFT to READY.

There's no Save button. Your changes save as you make them.

A condition is three choices, made left to right under Select a Question:

• Pick the source. The first dropdown, Select a survey, offers Tester Profile (the profile Highlight holds — age, pronouns, region), Qualifications & Custom Profiling (your screening questions), and one entry per product survey. The second dropdown stays disabled until you've chosen — the usual reason a question looks missing.
• Pick the question, then the Logic operator that appears once you have.
• Give a value where the operator needs one. Most questions show a tick-list, Answers (any of the following), where ticking several means any of them. Age takes a single number in Value instead.

Alongside a survey's questions you may also find Custom Criteria — tags Highlight carries on responses, like a recent-purchase flag. It sits in the question dropdown beside that survey's questions rather than being a source of its own.

So "rated 8 or above" is the scale question with the points 8, 9 and 10 ticked. "Ranked Brand A first" is the ranking question with First Rank Is and Brand A. "Aged 18 to 34" is two Age conditions joined with And — Greater than or equals 18 and Less than or equals 34.

Add more with Add Condition, or a fresh one with Add Group. Conditions inside a group share a single And or Or, and the groups themselves share one — so use groups when some conditions must all be true and others are alternatives.

Tip: Watch the count under the name field — "412 of 1000 participants". It counts people rather than responses and lags a moment behind your typing — the fastest way to spot a segment far broader or narrower than you meant.

Draft and Ready

A segment in DRAFT is yours alone. It won't appear in any dropdown, and nothing your colleagues see changes while you work on it. Build it, rework it, change your mind freely.

Switch it to READY and it becomes available everywhere in Insights. Ready also locks the segment so it can't be edited by accident — to change one, switch it back to DRAFT first, edit, then set it to READY again. That includes the premade ones.

Two things worth knowing:

• A segment with no conditions yet won't turn Ready, and won't tell you why — clicking READY simply does nothing. Add a condition and it'll turn.
• Duplicate adds " (copy)" to the name, so a name near the 30-character limit makes a copy too long to turn Ready. Shorten it first.

Using Your Segments

Once a segment is Ready, pick it from Segments in the settings sidebar on Explore, Scorecard, Crosstabs and your report, or from Filter on Penalty Analysis and Alienation Analysis.

Selecting segments replaces your product columns rather than adding to them: two segments across three products gives you six columns, and no un-segmented column remains. Download CSV on Crosstabs carries your selection through.

Only Approved responses ever count towards a segment, on screen and in the counter.

Related

• Product Groups — group your products instead of your people
• Crosstabs — where segment columns are easiest to read
• Explore — segments as chart series

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