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An insight theme saves a research interest, such as search experience or purchase barriers, and finds relevant Storyline insights. Use themes to return to a topic across chapters without searching the entire board again. Themes filter findings. They do not change recruitment, remove interview data, or restrict a dashboard’s participant population. For audience comparisons, use dashboard filters and splits.

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Create a theme

You need edit access to the Storyline’s underlying study to create, edit, or delete themes.
  1. Open Insights and choose Add a theme, or open Manage themes beside the existing themes.
  2. Choose Add filter to open Add theme.
  3. Enter a Title and Describe what to match.
  4. Save the theme and allow classification to finish.
The title is limited to 120 characters and the description to 2,000 characters. Both are required and both help determine matches. For example:
  • Title: Purchase barriers
  • Describe what to match: Insights about reasons people delay or abandon a purchase, including price, trust, delivery, and uncertainty about product fit. Exclude general satisfaction unless it explains a purchase decision.
Use specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. AI classification can miss relevant findings or include borderline ones, so check the matches against the theme’s purpose.

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Use a theme across chapters

Select a theme to narrow the insights shown for the period you are viewing. The displayed count reflects that chapter’s matching insights, rather than a count of participants or all historical matches. Choose All insights to clear the theme selection. New and edited themes are processed across waves. Matches can appear progressively while classification runs; an empty or changing count immediately after saving is not proof that no relevant evidence exists.

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Edit or delete a theme

Use Manage themes to edit its title or description. Either change can alter which insights match: renaming a theme is not necessarily cosmetic. Existing matches remain visible until each wave has been reclassified. Deleting a theme removes its saved definition and matching links. The underlying insights remain available through All insights. A theme organizes existing findings; it does not itself configure a new analysis taxonomy or rerun the program’s analysis. See Insights for reading evidence and finding histories, and Dashboard and metrics for participant filters and comparisons.