Studies & versions

Everything you do in vDynamiq lives inside a study, and the work you build and launch lives inside a version of that study. This study → version relationship is the foundation for every other concept, so it’s worth understanding clearly before you build.

What a study is

A study is the container for one research effort — one objective, one audience, one body of work. Think of it as the “project.” It holds the settings that stay constant no matter how many times you revise the actual questions, including:

• Identity — the study’s name, industry, and geography.
• The brief — your objective and key information areas (what you want to learn).
• Audience definition — the screener questions, demographics, and study groups that describe and segment who you’re researching, plus the personas generated from them.
• Experience settings — languages, Survey Buddy, and branding such as logos.

You create a study once. From then on, the content of the research — the framework, storyline, and scenes — is built and edited inside the study’s versions.

What a version is

A version is an editable, launchable snapshot of the study’s content: its framework of constructs and metrics, its storyline of chapters, and its scenes. When you create a study, vDynamiq automatically creates its first version as a draft.

Versions exist so you can iterate and launch without disturbing what’s already live. A live version keeps collecting responses untouched while you prepare a revised version alongside it. This is how you improve a study over time without losing the data — or the respondents’ trust — from what you already fielded.

A concrete example: you launch Version 1 of a brand study and it starts collecting responses. A week in, you decide two scenes should be reworded and one persona re-framed. Rather than editing the live version underneath your respondents, you clone it to Version 2, make the changes there, review, and launch V2 when it’s ready. V1’s responses remain intact and comparable.

The version lifecycle

A version moves through three states over its life:

DraftFully editable and private. You build and refine the framework, storyline, and scenes here. Nothing is visible to respondents. A version can be edited freely for as long as it stays in draft.

↓ launch

Active (live)Launched and collecting responses. This is the version respondents receive when they open the survey link, and the one whose answers feed the dashboard. Changes are constrained once live — see below.

↓ close

ClosedRetired from collection but fully preserved — its responses, results, and content stay intact for analysis and as a basis for cloning a new version.

• Draft — the working state. Everything is editable; nothing is public. Most of your building happens here.
• Active — the launched, live state. Respondents receive this version, and its responses accumulate into the dashboard. Because people are actively answering it, the changes you can safely make are limited (see Safe changes on a live study).
• Closed — retired from collection. Closing a version stops new responses but keeps everything it gathered, so you can still read its results and clone from it later.

See Activating & closing for exactly how a version moves between these states, and what happens to the survey link at each transition.

Iterating with a new version

When you want to change an approach after a version has gone live — a different storyline, a revised set of scenes, a new way of framing the audience — you clone the version. Cloning creates a fresh draft that starts from the existing content, so you keep everything that already worked and change only what you need. The original version and all of its responses remain untouched.

This clone-and-iterate pattern is the intended way to evolve a study:

1. Clone the current version to a new draft.
2. Make your changes and review them in the draft.
3. Launch the new version when it’s ready.
4. Close older versions once you’re done collecting on them.

See Cloning a version for the mechanics.

How this maps to what you actually do

Create a studyYou get the study + its first draft version

→

Build the draftFramework, storyline, scenes

→

LaunchDraft becomes active; you get a survey link

→

IterateClone to a new draft; close old versions

Where to go next

• Screener questions — qualifying who enters the study.
• Study groups — segmenting the audience into tailored tracks.
• Constructs & metrics — the measurement framework inside a version.
• Building a survey — the full walkthrough of creating a version.