Simulator - a tour of the dashboard

When you log into the admin side of a Simulator site, you arrive on what we call the dashboard. This page allows you to see some important information about your Simulator at a glance and easily navigate to other pages.

Simulator status

In the top right hand corner of the page, the dashboard has a box which shows the open and close dates for when respondents can take part and a countdown of how many days are remaining. This box also indicates the current state of your Simulator:

• When the Simulator is closed to receiving responses, the box will be pale blue and say 'Simulator is Closed'. The 'Close...' button will be greyed out, because the Simulator is currently closed, and you can open it by selecting the green 'Open...' button.

  

• When the Simulator is open to receive responses, the box will be green and say 'Simulator is Open'. The 'Open...' button will be greyed out, because the Simulator is already open, and you can close it by selecting the red 'Close...' button.

  

View live Simulator

Above the status box, in the top right hand corner of the dashboard, there is a link that says 'View Simulator'. Selecting this link will take you to the public landing page of the Simulator as it currently appears (in open or closed state).

Total responses and viewing results

Moving across to the top left hand corner of the dashboard, you'll find the total number of responses received to the Simulator so far, with a shortcut link to go and view the responses.

You can also access your responses via the Results heading in the main navigation bar along the top of the page.

Accessing editable content

Below that, under the heading Manage Simulator, there are 3 shortcut links to useful pages with editable content in the Simulator:

• General settings - a settings page where you can edit the title of the Simulator, open and close dates, and contact details to be displayed on the front page
• Groups and sliders - where you can build the interactive content of the Simulator and
• Pages - where you can edit the text displayed on various different pages in the Simulator, including the Policy pages linked in the site footer.

All of these pages can also be accessed via the Settings heading in the main navigation bar along the top of the page.

Responses graph and table

In the middle of the dashboard, there's a bar graph showing the number of responses that have been received day-by-day over the course of the Simulator. The x-axis represents the day by day breakdown and the y-axis represents the number of responses received.

You can zoom in or out as required, and there are some buttons that say 'Earlier' and 'Later' which allow you to move back in time and forward in time along the graph when you're zoomed in. (Those buttons will be greyed out if you're not zoomed in and can already see all of the graph data.)

There's also a 'View as table' button above the top right hand corner of the graph which allows you to view the same day-by-day breakdown in a table format.

If you hover your cursor over a bar in the graph, a dark grey bubble will appear providing the date and number of responses which that particular bar represents.

Lastly, at the bottom of the dashboard under the heading Export, there's a button to export all of the response data received to the Simulator to date in a .xlsx spreadsheet format. You can read more about the export in this article.