What is a Dimension?

A Dimension is a research question Kimola asks of every piece of customer feedback. Pain Points, for example, asks "What goes wrong or creates difficulty?" and Personas asks "Who is experiencing this?". Kimola reads each review, survey response or support conversation with that question, takes the answer the feedback gives, and groups the same answers across all of your data, so you see which answers your customers give and how often. Kimola has 10 Dimensions in five groups, and they are available in every package.

Themes and sentiment tell you what customers talk about and how they feel about it. They don't tell you why customers chose a product, what they still miss, who they are or in which situation a problem happens. A research team answers these questions by reading feedback with a fixed set of questions in mind. Dimensions ask the same questions of every record, and every answer stays tied to the feedback that gives it, so you can open the records behind an answer and read them in customers' own words.

The 10 Dimensions

Each Dimension asks one question. Its own article explains what you get from it, shows an example and says when to use it.

Motivations asks "Why is this chosen or preferred?" It reveals the underlying reasons, intentions or needs that drive the experience described in the feedback. Group: Drivers.

Pain Points asks "What goes wrong or creates difficulty?" It identifies recurring obstacles, breakdowns or sources of dissatisfaction within the experience. Group: Issues.

Unmet Needs asks "What is missing or desired?" It surfaces explicit or implicit expectations about what could be improved, added or changed. Groups: Issues, Drivers.

Personas asks "Who is experiencing this?" It infers distinct types of people or roles from the context, behavior and language patterns in the feedback. Group: Actors.

Experience Stages asks "When does this occur?" It shows the time, moment or stage in which the described experience takes place. Group: Context.

Experience Context asks "Where does this occur?" It indicates the environment, setting or situation in which the experience happens. Group: Context.

Social Context asks "With whom does this occur?" It reveals whether the experience is lived alone or together with others. Groups: Actors, Context.

Underlying Causes asks "Why does this occur?" It explains the deeper reasons or conditions that lead to the described situation. Group: Drivers.

Substitutions asks "Instead of what does this occur?" It shows which alternatives the described experience replaces or is compared against. Group: Comparisons.

Co-Occurrences asks "Alongside what does this occur?" It highlights other products, tools, behaviors or elements mentioned together with the experience. Groups: Comparisons, Context.

Dimension Groups

The groups sort the Dimensions by the kind of question they ask. When you add Dimensions to a Report, All shows every Dimension, and Drivers, Issues, Actors, Context and Comparisons show one group at a time. A Dimension can belong to two groups, so it appears under both.

• Drivers ask why: Motivations, Unmet Needs and Underlying Causes. Use them to understand what draws customers to a product and what lies behind the situations they describe.
• Issues ask what is wrong or lacking: Pain Points and Unmet Needs.
• Actors ask who is involved: Personas and Social Context.
• Context asks when, where, with whom and alongside what the experience happens: Experience Stages, Experience Context, Social Context and Co-Occurrences.
• Comparisons ask what the experience is weighed against or combined with: Substitutions and Co-Occurrences.

Dimensions from different groups often answer one research question together. Pain Points tells youwhat goes wrong, Underlying Causes tells you why, Experience Stages tells you at which moment and Personas tells you for whom.

Dimensions in Reports and Spaces

Dimensions work in Reports and in Spaces. What differs is how a Dimension is added and how its written analysis is kept up to date.

In a Report

You choose Dimensions in the Dimensions step while creating a Report, or add them to the Report later. Dimensions are optional: a Report works with classifiers alone. The Review step shows the Required Query before the analysis starts. The steps are in Add Dimensions to a Report.

Each Dimension of a Report gets an AI-written analysis on the Report's Dimensions page: a summary, the answers grouped as clusters with their record counts and share of total records, quotations (direct excerpts in respondents' own words) and the classifications behind them. A Report is one dataset analyzed once, so the analysis is written once, in the Report's output language. When an analysis hasn't been generated yet, Generate Now writes it. The Report's Overview also has a Dimensions card with Dimension Details and All Dimensions. See Dimensions in Reports.

In a Space

A Space doesn't choose Dimensions itself: they come from the Dimension models of the Funnel it uses. A Dimension model is a custom model created with the purpose Dimension, either for one of the 10 Dimensions or for a question of your own with a description. A Funnel holds at most one model for each Dimension. See Add Dimensions to a Funnel.

On the Space's Dimensions page, each Dimension shows its answers and how they change Over time, and an answer that changed significantly with the last upload shows ▲ or ▼ "since the last upload". In place of a one-time analysis, a Space has Insights: What the answers say for each Dimension and Why they answer so for each answer. Kimola writes them again after every new file, wherever the evidence moved, in the language of the Funnel. An answer gets its own Insight once 10 of the Space's latest records give it. See Dimensions in Spaces.

[Screenshot: The Dimensions page of a Space, with What the answers say above a Dimension's answers and a ▲ badge on one answer]

How Dimensions Work

Kimola classifies every piece of feedback with each Dimension you added. When the feedback answers the Dimension's question, the record gets that answer. When it says nothing about the question, it gets no answer for that Dimension. One piece of feedback can answer several Dimensions at once.

Motivations finds a faster warm-up. Pain Points finds a clogging milk frother and tedious descaling. Experience Context finds a small office, Social Context finds coworkers sharing the machine, Experience Stages finds the first week of use and Substitutions finds the old, slower machine.

Across thousands of records, Kimola groups the same answers together and counts the records that give each one. The counts and shares come from the classification itself. An AI model writes the summaries and Insights afterwards, from numbers that are already computed, so the text never decides which answer is larger. Dimensions don't change your data: they add answers to the records you already have.

Once feedback is classified with Dimensions, you can use them across the Report or Space. Filter the Content and Performance pages by an answer, or cross a Dimension with a column or a classifier in Tables, for example Pain Points by city or by product. In the Enterprise package, the pages of a Customer and a Department also show which Dimensions their feedback answers.