Understanding Dimensions — What Savo Measures and How
Dimensions are what every Signal Event sets out to learn about. This page covers how they're scored.
A Signal Session is a voice conversation between one participant and Savo's AI interviewer. Savo analyzes it by scoring specific Dimensions against a rubric set in advance. This page explains what a Dimension is, how it's scored, and how scores become the bands you see in a report.
Note: This page describes a construct-based event: one built around Dimensions that you, or Event Studio (the tool where you design an event), define before any session runs. A discovery event works differently. It has no Dimensions or rubric fixed in advance, explores a set of topics openly, and builds its report from what participants raised.
What a dimension is
A Dimension is one of the things your Signal Event sets out to learn about. In a construct-based event, each Dimension is defined before any sessions run, with clear criteria for what evidence looks like at each score level.
|
Example Dimension |
What it measures |
|---|---|
|
Competitive Confidence |
How strongly a sales rep believes they can win against named competitors |
|
Psychological Safety |
How safe an employee feels speaking up, taking risks, and admitting mistakes |
|
Career Clarity |
How well an employee understands their path forward and what growth looks like for them |
|
Manager Effectiveness |
How employees experience their relationship with their direct manager |
|
Perceived Ease of Use |
How easy a customer found it to get what they needed |
Each dimension comes with signal anchors: written descriptions of what a participant would need to say for their response to count as evidence at each score level. Because the anchors are set before anyone is interviewed, every participant is judged against the same standard, and scores can be compared across people and over time.
The 1–5 symmetrical scale
Every piece of evidence is scored on the same scale.
|
Score |
Level |
What it means |
|---|---|---|
|
5 |
Very High |
Strong, consistent evidence at the highest level |
|
4 |
High |
Clear evidence; minor gaps or qualifications |
|
3 |
Moderate |
Mixed evidence; meaningful signal in both directions |
|
2 |
Low |
Evidence leans against the dimension; notable gaps |
|
1 |
Very Low |
Strong, consistent evidence against the dimension |
The scale is symmetrical, so a 1 is as informative as a 5. A low score is a finding in its own right.
From scores to bands
The scale above applies to each piece of evidence. Each participant's score is the average of their evidence, and the group's score is the average across participants. Reports then place each dimension in one of three bands, using the group's average shown to one decimal place.
|
Band |
Group average |
|---|---|
|
Strength |
3.5 or higher |
|
Mixed |
2.5 or higher, and below 3.5 |
|
Opportunity |
Below 2.5 |
When fewer than 3 participants were scored on a dimension, the report shows "evidence thin — tentative" in place of a band, because too few people spoke to it for the average to mean much.
When "No Score" is the right answer
If a session doesn't produce enough evidence to score a dimension reliably, Savo abstains: it records "No Score" rather than producing a number. That's an expected outcome, and it tells you something.
Note: No Score is not a neutral score of 3. If many participants get No Score on the same dimension, that can itself be a signal: participants may be avoiding the topic, or the event may need refining to draw out more evidence.
For how confidence levels work alongside scores, see Confidence Levels and Why They Matter. For how scores are backed by evidence you can inspect, see Evidence Units.