Reading the Report Page

The picker: which survey are you reporting on?

Landing on /client/reports with no survey selected shows a table of every survey you own, with completion counts and the date of the most recent response. Click any row to open its report; the inline CSV button does the same export-only action you'd find inside the detail view, so you can pull data without loading the visuals first.

A survey marked Inactive still appears here. Inactive means new respondents can't take it any more — historical responses remain, and their report is fully functional.

The header strip

At the top of any single-survey report you'll see:

• The survey title as the page heading.
• A subtitle showing the completed response count and the date range (first to last completion), formatted in your Client account's timezone.
• Two buttons on the right: Survey Detail (jumps to the survey-builder view) and Export CSV.

The four summary stat cards

Across the top of the detail view, four cards summarize the response pool. Each has an info-button that explains it in the UI; here's what each really means and how they relate:

Verified rate — the percentage shown on the Verified card — is the single most useful summary number on this screen for any survey going to a stakeholder report. It tells you how much of your sample is defensible as real input from real people. For a deeper treatment see Understanding Verified vs. Anonymous Responses.

Per-question breakdown cards

Below the summary, each renderable question gets its own card. Cards appear in the order the questions appear on the Survey, numbered Q1, Q2, Q3…. The card header always shows the question text and the question type ("Dropdown", "Route Creator", etc.). Two visual signals can appear in the header:

• "Archived" badge — the question was soft-deleted but historical responses still exist. The data is shown so you can use it; new respondents won't see the question.
• Yellow "Heads up" callout below the header — the wording of this question changed during data collection. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Choice questions — horizontal bar charts

Radio, Dropdown, Range, Checkboxes, and Route Selector questions all render as a stack of horizontal bars. Each row shows the option label on the left, a filled bar in the middle showing share of respondents, and the raw count plus percentage on the right. Below the bars, a small caption tells you how many respondents answered the question at all (which can be less than the Completed total when the question was optional).

• For Radio / Dropdown / Range, each respondent chose one option, so percentages sum to 100 (with small rounding nudges).
• For Checkboxes, percentages are share-of-respondents per option, so they routinely sum to more than 100. A row at 72% means 72% of respondents checked that box, not that 72% of selections went to that box.
• For Route Selector, the labels are route names instead of option text, and "selections" replace "respondents" in the caption.

Text questions — recent excerpts

Short Text, Long Text, and Email questions show the total count of submitted text responses and a list of the most recent values, each truncated at 240 characters. The Report page is deliberately not the place to read every comment — if you need that, the CSV export contains the full text of every response.

The excerpts are useful for two things specifically: spotting whether the question is being misunderstood (a few quick reads tell you fast), and surfacing pull-quotes for stakeholder presentations.

Route Display — feedback excerpts

Route Display is treated like a text question for reporting purposes: the count of feedback responses and the recent excerpts list. The route itself doesn't need a visualization here — you already drew it.

Route Creator — corridor map and GeoJSON

This is the most visually rich question type on the Report page. You'll see:

• Two stat cards at the top of the question card — Respondents who drew and Total routes drawn (with an average routes-per-respondent number).
• A Top route corridors map showing up to five clustered corridors, labeled A through E, each in a distinct color. Below the map, a legend shows each corridor's share of the total drawn routes. A "+ N other" badge appears if some routes didn't fit any major cluster.
• An Export GeoJSON button that downloads every drawn route as a standard GeoJSON file, ready to drop into QGIS, ArcGIS, kepler.gl, or geojson.io.

A note on the corridor math: clustering is approximate, designed for "what are people roughly trying to do?" pattern recognition. Don't quote corridor percentages in a grant application as if they were authoritative line geometry. For anything that needs to hold up under technical review, export the GeoJSON and do the analysis in a real GIS tool — see Working with GeoJSON Route Data.

Route Ranker — per-route pie charts

Each preset route gets its own pie chart showing how respondents ranked it. A route consistently picked first will be one mostly-solid wedge; a route with a wide spread of rankings will look more fragmented. Reading several charts side by side is the fastest way to see which routes had real consensus and which were polarizing.

For Ranker specifically, the CSV column is "1. Route Name | 2. Route Name | 3…" — one cell per respondent showing their full ordering. That's the right format for joining to other tools that do rank-order analysis.

The "Heads up" rename-warning callout

When you edit the text of a question after responses have started coming in, the surveyVersion bumps and TIPS snapshots the new question text on every subsequent response. That preserves history — older responses keep the text the Traveler actually saw — but it also means a single chart on the Report page may aggregate responses to two or three subtly different questions.

Whenever that happens, TIPS shows a yellow callout above the breakdown:

Heads up: the wording of this question changed during data collection (N distinct versions seen). Responses below mix all versions — check the per-response drill-down if you need to know exactly what each Traveler was asked.

Two ways to investigate:

1. Per-response drill-down at /client/survey-response?id=<responseId> — shows the snapshotted question text for that one Traveler, exactly as they saw it.
2. CSV export — the question header column is annotated with "[renamed mid-collection]" so anyone you share the data with sees the warning too.

The pragmatic move when this happens: if the change was cosmetic (typo fix, clarification), the aggregate chart is fine. If it was substantive (you changed the meaning), filter the CSV by date so you analyze the two cohorts separately.

When a card says "No responses for this question yet"

Three reasons a question card can be empty even when the survey has completions:

• The question was added later. Earlier respondents never saw it, so there's nothing to report. New responses will populate the card.
• The question is optional and respondents skipped it. Empty submissions don't write a row to the response data; the card is genuinely empty.
• The question was archived and re-added at a new field id. Old responses are tied to the archived question (which has its own card with the "Archived" badge); the new card is empty until new responses arrive.

On-screen Report vs. CSV export

The Report page and the CSV are complementary, not competing:

A workflow that works

1. Open the report and read the four summary cards. Verified rate tells you how defensible the data is. Anonymous share tells you what you can and can't tie back to people.
2. Scan the question cards in order. Look for the yellow callout on any question and decide whether to treat it as one bucket or two.
3. Stop at any text card. Read five or six recent excerpts. You'll catch misunderstood questions and surface a couple of pull quotes for the stakeholder slide deck.
4. Open the route corridor map if there's a Route Creator question. The cluster pattern usually tells you whether to dig into the GeoJSON or not.
5. Export the CSV. The on-screen report answered the headline questions; the CSV is where you do everything else — cross-tabs, demographic filtering, weighted averages, sharing with stakeholders who don't have a TIPS login.

Common questions about the Report page

What do the four stat cards at the top mean?

Completed = total submitted responses. Verified = responses confirmed via email (with a percentage of the total). Anonymous = responses with no known email. Identified = responses tied to a known email (the inverse of anonymous). Verified is always a subset of Identified.

Why does one of my questions have a yellow "Heads up" callout?

That question's wording changed during data collection. TIPS detected more than one distinct snapshot of the question text in your responses. The bar chart below mixes responses from every version, so if exact wording matters for your analysis, use the per-response drill-down on /client/survey-response or the snapshotted question text in the CSV.

What is an "Archived" question?

A soft-deleted question that still has historical responses on file. The Question Editor hides it from new respondents, but the Report page surfaces it (with an "Archived" badge) so you don't lose the data. Hard-deleting these would orphan rows in survey_response_data.

Why do the bar chart percentages sometimes not add up to 100?

For Checkboxes questions, respondents can pick more than one option, so the percentages are share-of-respondents per option, not share-of-the-total. For Radio / Dropdown / Range, percentages should sum to 100 (subject to rounding). For Route Selector, each respondent picks exactly one route, so percentages sum to 100 as well.

How are the route corridors on Route Creator maps calculated?

TIPS clusters Traveler-drawn routes by geometric similarity and surfaces the top five corridors (A, B, C, D, E) with their share of total routes. The math is approximate — meant for at-a-glance pattern recognition, not authoritative line geometry. For real GIS analysis, use the GeoJSON export and a tool like QGIS or kepler.gl.

What do the Route Ranker pie charts show?

One pie chart per route, broken into wedges by rank. A route that landed 1st place 60% of the time, 2nd 30%, and 3rd 10% shows a chart with three wedges in those proportions. Reading several charts together tells you how consistently a route was ranked high (or low) across respondents.

What do the text-question excerpts show?

The page lists the most recent Short Text / Long Text / Email responses, truncated at 240 characters. The total count is shown above the list. The full untruncated values — every response, not just recent — are in the CSV export.

How is the on-screen Report different from the CSV?

The Report aggregates: bar chart totals, recent excerpts, corridor clusters, rank distributions. The CSV is one row per response with one column per question — full text, full selected option values, full route summaries. Use the Report to answer "what did people think?" and the CSV to do anything quantitative or to load the data into another tool.