Five-Minute Tour of Decode
Overview
This article gives you a quick overview of Decode. It will help you understand what each part of the platform does, and guide you on what to do next. For complete step-by-step detail on any section, see the related articles linked at the end.
Home
Your Dashboard is the main page you'll land on after logging in, and the one you'll use most often in Decode. From here you can:
- Access every study, file, and folder that's been created in your workspace
- Create a new study using the Create Study action (Quantitative Study, Live Interviews, AI Interviews, or AI Creative Insights)
- Open Insights Hub, next to Create Study, to store documents and files — including studies run in Decode, as well as PDFs, documents, or session recordings from other platforms — and get insights from them in one place
- Use Ask Decode (Copilot) to ask questions and pull details from an existing study, without opening it manually
- Move to any other section of Decode using the sidebar
Each item on your Dashboard shows its Last Updated date, Status (such as Active or Closed), and Key Metrics (such as number of responses or sessions), so you can see the state of your research at a glance. You can also narrow what you're looking at using the All Items, Studies, Files, and Folders tabs.
Integrations
The Integrations page is where you connect Decode to other tools you're already using, so information flows into Decode automatically instead of you having to upload it by hand each time.
Integrations are organized into three categories:
- Video Conferencing (Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams) — Connect your meeting platform account so your recorded sessions and interviews sync into Decode automatically, ready for analysis.
- FTP Server — Connect an FTP server so media files (recordings, videos, documents) transfer into Decode automatically, without manual uploads.
- Audience Panel (Cint, Dynata) — Connect to external participant panels so you can recruit real people for your studies directly through Decode, instead of sourcing participants yourself.
To connect one, click Add Integration, choose the tool you want from the list, and click Activate. Once connected, you'll see its status marked as Active on the Integrations page, so you always know what's currently linked to your workspace.
Approvals
The place where studies are reviewed and approved before they go live, if your workspace uses this step.
Some workspaces assign one or more users as an Approval Manager. Any study submitted for publishing will go through the approval process and must be approved before it becomes active.
- If you're an Approval Manager, you'll be able to view the studies assigned for your review and approval, and you can approve or reject them.
- If approval access was not given to anyone, you can publish your studies directly.
Demo Mode
A version of Decode pre-loaded with sample studies and files, separate from your live workspace. Use it to see how studies are built, how results are displayed, and how the platform behaves, before working with your own research.
- Click Demo Mode in the sidebar to enter it
- While active, a yellow frame appears around the entire interface, and the Demo Mode item in the sidebar stays highlighted
- Actions taken in Demo Mode do not affect your real studies, files, or data
Create Study
The starting point for any type of research in Decode. You'll be shown four research types to choose from:
- AI Interview - Use AI to conduct automated interviews and capture insights from guided discussions
- Live Interviews - Explore consumer behavior through interviews and focus groups
- Quantitative Study - Test creatives, measure engagement, and predict performance with AI
- AI Creative Insights - Upload a creative (image or video) and get AI-predicted performance results. You can also create a Synthetic Audience, a defined audience group so the AI predicts how that specific audience would respond to the creative
After selecting a research type, click Create From Scratch to begin building your study.
Invite User
Invite your teammates into your workspace so they can access studies, files, and folders alongside you. When you invite someone, you can assign them a role Admin, Manager, Viewer, or Auditor which controls what they're able to do, and a home team, the team they land on by default when they log in. They will also receive an email to set up their account and join.
Ask Decode (Copilot)
Decode's built-in AI assistant, available from the top-right of your Dashboard. Use it to ask a question about your research and get a detailed insight pulled directly from your studies and files, instead of searching through them manually. Type @ to reference a specific study or file directly when asking your question. Turn on Deep Context when you need a deeper, cross-study analysis useful for comparing results or spotting patterns across multiple pieces of research at once.
Global Search
Searches across your entire workspace from a single place, instead of navigating through folders manually. Open it from the search icon at the top of your Dashboard, then narrow results by Study, Folder, Files, Tags, Highlights, or Transcript.
Help
Opens the Decode Help Center from inside the platform. Use it to find step-by-step articles, look up how a feature works, or get support, without leaving your workspace.
Settings
Where workspace-level configuration is managed, separate from settings on an individual study. Settings is organized into tabs:
- Profile — your personal account details
- Users — invite and manage the people in your workspace
- Teams — create and manage teams, and control who has access to what
- Audience Credits — view or add credits used to access the Decode Panel for participant recruitment
- Authentication — manage sign-in security, including two-factor authentication
- Synthetic Audience — create audience groups to test how creatives perform with a specific audience
- MCP — connect Decode to AI assistants using Model Context Protocol (MCP), so they can securely access your workspace
Where to go next
New to Decode: Start with Getting Started with Decode
Ready to create something: Your First Study in 10 Minutes
Want the Dashboard explained in full depth: The Decode Dashboard