Concept Testing with No Stimulus Deck

Use this method when you discuss concepts, products, brands or messages in person, or when your files are audio, or video that doesn’t show a stimulus deck on screen. CoLoop automatically labels the transcript wherever a concept is explicitly mentioned, so you can analyse the reaction to each one separately. If your recordings show a deck on screen, use Stimulus Deck Concept Testing instead, so concepts are tagged from the slides as well as the transcript.

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Set up your project

Concept testing isn’t a toggle or a project type. It switches on as soon as your project has concepts, and you add those in the project setup flow. When you create a project, CoLoop walks you through a short series of setup steps. The one that matters here is Concepts: choose Yes when asked whether you’re testing any stimulus, concepts or messages, then add your concepts. You don’t have to do this at creation time. You can add or change concepts later from the project sidebar using Add concepts / Edit concepts.

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Add your concepts

In the editor, each concept has three parts: Without a deck, CoLoop only has the transcript to go on, so synonyms matter more here. Add every realistic way participants might name a concept:

• BenchSci → add the synonym “BS” if participants might use the abbreviation.
• Benchling → if you showed a distinct version (such as the pink one), add “Pink” so colour-based mentions link back to the concept.
• For multi-market studies, add the foreign-language versions of each concept name as synonyms.

A few things that make the editor faster on larger studies:

• Expand all / Collapse all to work through a long list.
• Copy concepts to clipboard and Paste concepts from clipboard to move a concept set between projects, or to build it in a spreadsheet first.

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Suggested concepts

If you uploaded a discussion guide in the Study documents step, CoLoop reads it and suggests concepts for you. Add the ones you want, edit them as you like, and ignore the rest. Nothing is added to your project until you accept it.

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Reference concepts clearly in your interviews

Because detection relies entirely on the transcript, how you talk about concepts in the session matters:

• Be consistent with terminology when referring to concepts.
• Introduce each concept clearly so it comes through in the transcript.

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Upload and transcribe your files

• Upload audio, video, or text transcripts related to your study.
• For audio or video files, transcribe them within CoLoop and confirm speaker identities.

CoLoop tags the transcript automatically once your files are processed.

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Check concept tagging

Review whether concepts have been tagged correctly. Without a stimulus deck, CoLoop only tags text segments that directly mention the concept names or their synonyms.

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When no concepts are detected

If concept detection finishes without tagging anything in a file, the Files list shows a No concepts detected warning on that file with two actions:

• Retry runs concept detection on the file again. Use this after fixing the likely cause, for example by adding synonyms for the ways participants referred to a concept, or correcting the transcript.
• Dismiss clears the warning from the file. Use this when the file genuinely doesn’t mention any concepts, such as a warm-up session or a group that wasn’t shown the stimulus.

Dismissing applies to everyone in the project. If concept detection runs on the file again and still finds nothing, the warning reappears. To clear the warning on several files at once, select them in the Files list and run Dismiss no concepts detected warning from the batch actions.

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Tag concepts by hand

Since this method only tags explicit mentions, you can apply concepts manually where needed. Highlight the segments of text, click + Add concept, choose the concept and confirm.

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Next steps

See Analysing Concepts for how to use concept labels in grids and chats.