Groups vs participants

Why two layers and not one

A participant on their own is one specific person. A pile of participants without structure is hard to reason about. The group layer gives you the structure: it says here are five distinct ways people in this audience approach decisions, and then each group is realised as multiple participants with the same behavioral DNA but different identities, life context, memory, and language.

Groups are good for thinking. Participants are good for interviewing.

The groups view

Each group card shows you the shape, not the people. The key fields:

Name and description: the human label and a paragraph on what makes this group distinct.
Defining dimensions: the specific axes that make this group different from the others, shown as tags like risk_orientation: cautious or tooling_preference: minimal. Hover any tag to see why this dimension is distinctive for this group. There are 3 to 5 defining dimensions per group.
Personality range (OCEAN): the Big Five personality traits, scored 0 to 100 against real population data and shown as min-max ranges rather than single values. A group might run Openness 55-75, meaning every participant in this group falls somewhere in that band, with a short line beside the bar saying what that band looks like in conversation. The bands are how groups hold together as behavioral shapes while still producing variation across participants. The (i) beside the heading explains how the ranges are checked, and when a second pass sets one itself.
Primary biases: the cognitive biases this group carries, each shown as a 0 to 100 range on the same kind of bar, with a line saying how hard it pulls and what it does. Status quo 50-70 means every participant in this group carries that bias somewhere in that band. Each group lists three to six biases. The bands come from research on how each bias varies across people. When three or more groups carry the same bias, they must spread across that range rather than bunching in the middle: the model writes each band, and a second pass sets one itself when the model keeps missing that spread. A bias carried by only one or two groups is placed by each group's own description and evidence instead.

Group cards collapse by default to the name and description. Click Show details to expand the dimensions, OCEAN ranges, and biases. Worth doing for every group before you start interviewing. It tells you what differences to expect and which conversations are worth running.

The participants view

Each participant is one of those group shapes brought to life. The participant card in the list shows:

Name: a believable first + last name.
Short descriptor: a single line capturing who they are and the situation they’re in.
Demographics pills: quick-reference tags like age, occupation, location, household, business size. The exact axes shown depend on whether the audience is B2C or B2B.
Sourcing: a chip reading Well sourced, Partly sourced or Thinly sourced: how many of this participant’s fields trace back to your evidence and your setup, counted from the same badges the profile shows. A participant whose citations were never checked shows a grey Not checked chip instead. See the participant profile guide for what feeds it.
Quality checks: not on the card at all. A participant that failed one is named, with a sentence saying what was counted, in the Participant quality check panel at the top of the page. A near miss is not flagged there or anywhere else, and neither are the internal checks that watch our own pipeline rather than the participant.

The card is deliberately thin. Personality and biases are one click deeper: open the profile and you get all five Big Five traits as a single value per trait, each with a reading of how the participant comes across at that score (each one is sampled from somewhere inside their group’s range), and every bias with its intensity and what it does. Click any participant card to open that profile and start interviewing.

Two buttons sit at the top right of the participants page, beside the page title, under the heading Next steps. Review evidence takes you back to the audience screen to check what the participants were built from. Start research takes you into research: to your research plans if you already have one, or straight into building one if you don’t. Viewers see only Review evidence, since their role can’t run research. Under the title, a line gives the count, for example “24 participants across 7 groups, built from your inputs and sourced evidence.” Below the buttons is the participant quality check, collapsed to a single line. Expanding it shows only the participants that raised a warning or an issue, plus a breakdown of what shaped this set. Participants that passed everything are not listed, so an expanded panel with nothing in it means nothing needs your attention. At the foot of the page sits Audience and participant inputs, collapsed, holding what you typed during audience setup so you can check it without leaving the page.

How to use the two surfaces together

Read groups first. They tell you what you’re looking at. Without that frame, every participant feels equally important.
Pick participants to interview from across groups, not within one. Three participants from the same group will give you three flavors of the same view. One participant from each of three groups gives you genuine difference.
When tensions show up in synthesis, look at the groups. Genuine tensions almost always trace to two groups pulling in opposite directions on a specific defining dimension. That’s the build-or-pivot signal.

The question at the bottom of the page

Below the groups you’ll be asked once, per audience, how well these participants reflect the people you’re actually trying to reach, with an optional box for what stands out or what’s off. It goes to the Candor team, not into the research, and it’s the fastest way to tell us when an audience missed. Answering or dismissing it retires it for you on that audience; a colleague opening the same page is still asked, because you may read the same group very differently.

A note on rigor

The group layer isn’t a stylistic flourish. It’s the difference between a set of participants who all sound the same and one whose members genuinely disagree with each other in ways grounded in measurable behavioral differences. Big Five ranges, bias intensities, and defining dimensions are all calibrated against research data; the group is what holds them together as a coherent shape.