Note: this article describes a feature that appears only in the Discover Dashboard, which will be retired soon. For information about our new Results Dashboard click here.

Bars highlights larger themes and is great to use when those themes align with actions coming out of an exchange.

Bars is a familiar visualization in the Discover Dashboard that helps leaders see the size difference between themes in their results. This shows which ideas were shared most often, and resonated most with participants. 

This article describes how leaders can: 

• Populate the bars visualization
• Explore bars
• Publish a bars theme set

Populating the Bars visualization

Bars will automatically populate with either the AI-generated themes or any custom theme sets that you create in the Theme tab.

• AI-generated themes: If you launched an exchange and received six participant thoughts, your Bars visualization will instantly populate with our AI generated theme set. This theme set uses machine learning to find and group thoughts using common keywords.
• Custom themes: Create your own custom theme set to deeply understand the contents of the thoughts as well as participant sentiment. There are several approaches to this and they should all be guided by the progress you’d like to make in the exchange. Again, these will be instantly available in the Bars tab as soon as you create them.

Creating multiple theme sets lets you use a different framework for each set (sentiment versus strategic importance, for example). You can then head into Telabs and use the ThemeFlow tool to compare the theme sets side by side.

Exploring bars

The default view for Bars shows the AI-generated themes by star score, which compares how high or low participants rated each theme. You can also view themes by total thoughts, which lets you see the size of each topic in the exchange.

• The toggle in the upper right-hand corner switches between star score and total thoughts. 

Any of the bars can be selected to bring up the complete list of thoughts in that theme. This is also one of the places where you can comment on thoughts as a leader. Remember, comments are instantly public, and will show up for participants in the exchange as soon as they’re entered. 

Publishing a bars theme set

Use the print feature embedded in each theme or create a summary report in the Report tab to publish the entire visualization.

• Print feature: Use this to share  thoughts within a single theme. Click on any bar to open up the list of thoughts and then use the Print icon in the upper-right corner to create a pdf. 
• If you grouped thoughts by department, then this is a great way to share the thoughts with individual teams in your organization.
• Summary report: Use this to share the entire visualization with participants so they can get a sense of big picture topics coming out of the exchange. As you’re customizing your summary report, select the Bars section and it will show up in your final report.
• Make sure to click on the settings dial and pick a theme set to share and enable or disable thought and theme level comments.

Sharing results with teams who need to take action, and the organization or community who contributed to and will be affected by the results is key to building engagement and trust. Bars, as mentioned above, is a familiar visualization, and so it is a great way to highlight themes that align with actions coming out of the exchange.

If you need general support with the Dashboard, don’t hesitate to reach out to help@thoughtexchange.com.