Your timeline chart is a great way to discover trends and monitor key business metrics over time. By default, we'll show you the frequency of your themes over time, but you can use the drop-down menus along the top to select different data points, metrics, and time periods as well!
In this guide, we'll be using responses for an Airline NPS survey to illustrate how to effectively use the timeline.
Gauging Change Visually
By default, the timeline will show the frequency of themes on a monthly basis. The monthly frequency is a little low in our dataset, which makes the trend lines susceptible to noise and somewhat difficult to interpret. So, we'll change the resolution to quarterly. In addition, we'll apply the zoom function, which renders the chart in a much larger area, making it easier to visually gauge change.
If there are no extreme spikes in the chart, it may still be hard to pick out key changes. Hovering over the legend items will highlight the corresponding trend line on the chart and make it easier to see how it changes over time. We can also Hide All items and click the legend to render just the themes we want to visualize.
Tip: Manually selecting which timeline items to display is a good way to create clear exports to be used in reports or presentations.
Measuring Change
When you notice a significant change in a trend line, you can hover over a point to show a detailed tooltip. Of particular note, you'll see both percentage change since the previous data point and percentage change since the first data point.
Changing the Data Displayed
The timeline shows themes by default, but this can be changed using the Data menu. For our example, we'll choose "Cabin Flown". This will give us a view of how the distribution of respondents by Cabin changes over time. Let's also change the metric using the Display menu; we'll pick "Impact on NPS" to see how these different customer segments are affecting our primary experience metric (for details on impact, see here).
As a result, we see that while the impact of most segments on NPS is fairly constant, the impact of responses from "Economy Class" flyers fluctuates significantly:
Exporting Data
You can export the current visual state of the timeline chart as PNG or SVG, or you can export the underlying data via CSV. All of these options are available from the Export menu in the top right corner.
Questions? 🤔
If you have any questions about your timeline (or need some help!) you can get in touch with us any time by hitting the blue chat button to your right 👉