A quick analysis of feedback collected with OptimalSort
Card sorting is an invaluable tool for understanding how people organize information in their minds, making websites more intuitive and content easier to navigate. It’s a useful method outside of information architecture and UX research, too. It can be a useful prioritization technique, or used in a more traditional sense. For example, it’s handy in psychology, sociology or anthropology to inform research and deepen our understanding of how people conceptualize information.
The introduction of remote card sorting has provided many advantages, making it easier than ever to conduct your own research. Tools such as our very own OptimalSort allow you to quickly and easily gather findings from a large number of participants from all around the world. Not having to organize moderated, face-to-face sessions gives researchers more time to focus on their work, and easier access to larger data sets.
One of the main disadvantages of remote card sorting is that it eliminates the opportunity to dive deeper into the choices made by your participants. Human conversation is a great thing, and when conducting a remote card sort with users who could potentially be on the other side of the world, opportunities for our participants to provide direct feedback and voice their opinions are severely limited.Your survey design may not be perfect.
The labels you provide your participants may be incorrect, confusing or redundant. Your users may have their own ideas of how you could improve your products or services beyond what you are trying to capture in your card sort. People may be more willing to provide their feedback than you realize, and limiting their insights to a simple card sort may not capture all that they have to offer.So, how can you run an unmoderated, remote card sort, but do your best to mitigate this potential loss of insight?
A quick look into the data
In an effort to evaluate the usefulness of the existing “Leave a comment” feature in OptimalSort, I recently asked our development team to pull out some data.You might be asking “There’s a comment box in OptimalSort?”If you’ve never noticed this feature, I can’t exactly blame you. It’s relatively hidden away as an unassuming hyperlink in the top right corner of your card sort.
Comments left by your participants can be viewed in the “Participants” tab in your results section, and are indicated by a grey speech bubble.
The history of the button is unknown even to long-time Optimal Workshop team members. The purpose of the button is also unspecified. “Why would anyone leave a comment while participating in a card sort?”, I found myself wondering.As it turns out, 133,303 comments have been left by participants. This means 133,303 insights, opinions, critiques or frustrations. Additionally, these numbers only represent the participants who noticed the feature in the first place. Considering the current button can easily be missed when focusing on the task at hand, I can’t help but wonder how this number might change if we drew more attention to the feature.
Breaking down the comments
To avoid having to manually analyze and code 133,303 open text fields, I decided to only spend enough time to decipher any obvious patterns. Luckily for me, this didn’t take very long. After looking at only a hundred or so random entries, four distinct types of comments started to emerge.
This card/group doesn’t make sense.Comments related to cards and groups dominate. This is a great thing, as it means that the majority of comments made by participants relate specifically to the task they are completing. For closed and hybrid sorts, comments frequently relate to the predefined categories available, and since the participants most likely to leave a comment are those experiencing issues, the majority of the feedback relates to issues with category names themselves. Many comments are related to card labels and offer suggestions for improving naming conventions, while many others draw attention to some terms being confusing, unclear or jargony. Comments on task length can also be found, along with reasons for why certain cards may be left ungrouped, e.g., “I’ve left behind items I think the site could do without”.
Your organization is awesome for doing this/you’re doing it all wrong. A substantial number of participants used the comment box as an opportunity to voice their general feedback on the organization or company running the study. Some of the more positive comments include an appreciation for seeing private companies or public sector organizations conducting research with real users in an effort to improve their services. It’s also nice to see many comments related to general enjoyment in completing the task.On the other hand, some participants used the comment box as an opportunity to comment on what other areas of their services should be improved, or what features they would like to see implemented that may otherwise be missed in a card sort, e.g., “Increased, accurate search functionality is imperative in a new system”.
This isn’t working for me. Taking a closer look at some of the comments reveals some useful feedback for us at Optimal Workshop, too. Some of the comments relate specifically to UI and usability issues. The majority of these issues are things we are already working to improve or have dealt with. However, for researchers, comments that relate to challenges in using the tool or completing the survey itself may help explain some instances of data variability.
#YOLO, hello, ;) And of course, the unrelated. As you may expect, when you provide people with the opportunity to leave a comment online, you can expect just about anything in return.
How to make the most of your user insights in OptimalSort
If you’re running a card sort, chances are you already place a lot of value in the voice of your users. To ensure you capture any additional insights, it’s best to ensure your participants are aware of the opportunity to do so. Here are two ways you may like to ensure your participants have a space to voice their feedback:
Adding more context to the “Leave a comment” feature
One way to encourage your participants to leave comments is to promote the use of the this feature in your card sort instructions. OptimalSort gives you flexibility to customize your instructions every time you run a survey. By making your participants aware of the feature, or offering ideas around what kinds of comments you may be looking for, you not only make them more likely to use the feature, but also open yourself up to a whole range of additional feedback. An advantage of using this feature is that comments can be added in real time during a card sort, so any remarks can be made as soon as they arise.
Making use of post-survey questions
Adding targeted post-survey questions is the best way to ensure your participants are able to voice any thoughts or concerns that emerged during the activity. Here, you can ask specific questions that touch upon different aspects of your card sort, such as length, labels, categories or any other comments your participants may have. This can not only help you generate useful insights but also inform the design of your surveys in the future.
Make your remote card sorts more human
Card sorts are exploratory by nature. Avoid forcing your participants into choices that may not accurately reflect their thinking by giving them the space to voice their opinions. Providing opportunities to capture feedback opens up the conversation between you and your users, and can lead to surprising insights from unexpected places.
Session replay allows you to record participants completing a card sort without the need for plug-ins or integrations. This great new feature captures the participant's interactions and creates a recording for each participant completing the card sort that you can view in your own time. It’s a great way to identify where users may have struggled to categorize information to correlate with the insights you find in your data.
Session replay interacts with a study and nothing else. It does not include audio or face recording in the first release, but we’re working on it for the future.
There is no set-up or plug-in required; you control the use of screen replay in the card sort settings.
For enterprise customers, the account admin will be required to turn this feature on for teams to access.
Session replay is currently only available on card sort, but it’s coming soon to other study types.
To activate session replay, create a card sort or open an existing card sort that has not yet been launched. Click on ‘set up,’ then ‘settings’; here, you will see the option to turn on session replay for your card sort. This feature will be off by default, and you must turn it on for each card study.
How do I view a session replay?
To view a session replay of a card sort, go to Results > Participants > Select a participant > Session replay.
I can't see session replay in the card sort settings 👀
If this is the case, you will need to reach out to your organization's account admin to ask for this to be activated at an organizational level. It’s really easy for session replay to be enabled or disabled by the organization admin just by navigating to Settings > Features > Session Replay, where it can be toggled on/off.
"Hi Optimal Work,I was wondering if there are some best practices you stick to when creating or sending out different UX research studies (i.e. Card sorts, Prototyye Test studies, etc)? Thank you! Mary"
Indeed I do! Over the years I’ve learned a lot about creating remote research studies and engaging participants. That experience has taught me a lot about what works, what doesn’t and what leaves me refreshing my results screen eagerly anticipating participant responses and getting absolute zip. Here are my top tips for remote research study creation and launch success!
Creating remote research studies
Use screener questions and post-study questions wisely
Screener questions are really useful for eliminating participants who may not fit the criteria you’re looking for but you can’t exactly stop them from being less than truthful in their responses. Now, I’m not saying all participants lie on the screener so they can get to the activity (and potentially claim an incentive) but I am saying it’s something you can’t control. To help manage this, I like to use the post-study questions to provide additional context and structure to the research.
Depending on the study, I might ask questions to which the answers might confirm or exclude specific participants from a specific group. For example, if I’m doing research on people who live in a specific town or area, I’ll include a location based question after the study. Any participant who says they live somewhere else is getting excluded via that handy toggle option in the results section. Post-study questions are also great for capturing additional ideas and feedback after participants complete the activity as remote research limits your capacity to get those — you’re not there with them so you can’t just ask. Post-study questions can really help bridge this gap. Use no more than five post-study questions at a time and consider not making them compulsory.
Do a practice run
No matter how careful I am, I always miss something! A typo, a card with a label in the wrong case, forgetting to update a new version of an information architecture after a change was made — stupid mistakes that we all make. By launching a practice version of your study and sharing it with your team or client, you can stop those errors dead in their tracks. It’s also a great way to get feedback from the team on your work before the real deal goes live. If you find an error, all you have to do is duplicate the study, fix the error and then launch. Just keep an eye on the naming conventions used for your studies to prevent the practice version and the final version from getting mixed up!
Sending out remote research studies
Manage expectations about how long the study will be open for
Something that has come back to bite me more than once is failing to clearly explain when the study will close. Understandably, participants can be left feeling pretty annoyed when they mentally commit to complete a study only to find it’s no longer available. There does come a point when you need to shut the study down to accurately report on quantitative data and you’re not going to be able to prevent every instance of this, but providing that information upfront will go a long way.
Provide contact details and be open to questions
You may think you’re setting yourself up to be bombarded with emails, but I’ve found that isn’t necessarily the case. I’ve noticed I get around 1-3 participants contacting me per study. Sometimes they just want to tell me they completed it and potentially provide additional information and sometimes they have a question about the project itself. I’ve also found that sometimes they have something even more interesting to share such as the contact details of someone I may benefit from connecting with — or something else entirely! You never know what surprises they have up their sleeves and it’s important to be open to it. Providing an email address or social media contact details could open up a world of possibilities.
Don’t forget to include the link!
It might seem really obvious, but I can’t tell you how many emails I received (and have been guilty of sending out) that are missing the damn link to the study. It happens! You’re so focused on getting that delivery right and it becomes really easy to miss that final yet crucial piece of information.
To avoid this irritating mishap, I always complete a checklist before hitting send:
Have I checked my spelling and grammar?
Have I replaced all the template placeholder content with the correct information?
Have I mentioned when the study will close?
Have I included contact details?
Have I launched my study and received confirmation that it is live?
Have I included the link to the study in my communications to participants?
Does the link work? (yep, I’ve broken it before)
General tips for both creating and sending out remote research studies
Know your audience
First and foremost, before you create or disseminate a remote research study, you need to understand who it’s going to and how they best receive this type of content. Posting it out when none of your followers are in your user group may not be the best approach. Do a quick brainstorm about the best way to reach them. For example if your users are internal staff, there might be an internal communications channel such as an all-staff newsletter, intranet or social media site that you can share the link and approach content to.
Keep it brief
And by that I’m talking about both the engagement mechanism and the study itself. I learned this one the hard way. Time is everything and no matter your intentions, no one wants to spend more time than they have to. Even more so in situations where you’re unable to provide incentives (yep, I’ve been there). As a rule, I always stick to no more than 10 questions in a remote research study and for card sorts, I’ll never include more than 60 cards. Anything more than that will see a spike in abandonment rates and of course only serve to annoy and frustrate your participants. You need to ensure that you’re balancing your need to gain insights with their time constraints.
As for the accompanying approach content, short and snappy equals happy! In the case of an email, website, other social media post, newsletter, carrier pigeon etc, keep your approach spiel to no more than a paragraph. Use an audience appropriate tone and stick to the basics such as: a high level sentence on what you’re doing, roughly how long the study will take participants to complete, details of any incentives on offer and of course don’t forget to thank them.
Set clear instructions
The default instructions in Optimal Workshop’s suite of tools are really well designed and I’ve learned to borrow from them for my approach content when sending the link out. There’s no need for wheel reinvention and it usually just needs a slight tweak to suit the specific study. This also helps provide participants with a consistent experience and minimizes confusion allowing them to focus on sharing those valuable insights!
Create a template
When you’re on to something that works — turn it into a template! Every time I create a study or send one out, I save it for future use. It still needs minor tweaks each time, but I use them to iterate my template.What are your top tips for creating and sending out remote user research studies? Comment below!
The key purpose of running a card sort is to learn something new about how people conceptualize and organize the information that’s found on your website. The insights you gain from running a card sort can then help you develop a site structure with content labels or headings that best represent the way your users think about this information. Card sorts are in essence a simple technique, however it’s the details of the sort that can determine the quality of your results.
Adding context to cards in OptimalSort – descriptions, links and images
In most cases, each item in a card sort has only a short label, but there are instances where you may wish to add additional context to the items in your sort. Currently, the cards tab in OptimalSort allows you to include a tooltip description, a link within the tooltip description or to format the card as an image (with or without a label).
We generally don’t recommend using tooltip descriptions and links, unless you have a specific reason to do so. It’s likely that they’ll provide your participants with more information than they would normally have when navigating your website, which may in turn influence your results by leading participants to a particular solution.
Legitimate reasons that you may want to use descriptions and links include situations where it’s not possible or practical to translate complex or technical labels (for example, medical, financial, legal or scientific terms) into plain language, or if you’re using a card sort to understand your participants’ preferences or priorities.
If you do decide to include descriptions in your sort, it’s important that you follow the same guidelines that you would otherwise follow for writing card labels. They should be easy for your participants to understand and you should avoid obvious patterns, for example repeating words and phrases, or including details that refer to the current structure of the website.
A quick survey of how card descriptions are used in OptimalSort
I was curious to find out how often people were including descriptions in their card sorts, so I asked our development team to look into this data. It turns out that around 15% of cards created in OptimalSort have at least some text entered in the description field. In order to dig into the data a bit further, both Ania and I reviewed a random sample of recent sorts and noted how descriptions were being used in each case.
We found that out of the descriptions that we reviewed, 40% (6% of the total cards) had text that should not have impacted the sort results. Most often, these cards simply had the card label repeated in the description (to be honest, we’re not entirely sure why so many descriptions are being used this way! But it’s now in our roadmap to stop this from happening — stay tuned!). Approximately 20% (3% of the total cards) used descriptions to add context without obviously leading participants, however another 40% of cards have descriptions that may well lead to biased results. On occasion, this included linking to the current content or using what we assumed to be the current top level heading within the description.
Testing the effect of card descriptions on sort results
So, how much influence could potentially leading card descriptions have on the results of a card sort? I decided to put it to the test by running a series of card sorts to compare the effect of different descriptions. As I also wanted to test the effect of linking card descriptions to existing content, I had to base the sort on a live website. In addition, I wanted to make sure that the card labels and descriptions were easily comprehensible by a general audience, but not so familiar that participants were highly likely to sort the cards in a similar manner.
I selected the government immigration website New Zealand Now as my test case. This site, which provides information for prospective and new immigrants to New Zealand, fit the above criteria and was likely unfamiliar to potential participants.
Navigating the New Zealand Now website
When I reviewed the New Zealand Now site, I found that the top level navigation labels were clear and easy to understand for me personally. Of course, this is especially important when much of your target audience is likely to be non-native English speaking! On the whole, the second level headings were also well-labeled, which meant that they should translate to cards that participants were able to group relatively easily.
There were, however, a few headings such as “High quality” and “Life experiences”, both found under “Study in New Zealand”, which become less clear when removed from the context of their current location in the site structure. These headings would be particularly useful to include in the test sorts, as I predicted that participants would be more likely to rely on card descriptions in the cases where the card label was ambiguous.
I selected 30 headings to use as card labels from under the sections “Choose New Zealand”, “Move to New Zealand”, “Live in New Zealand”, “Work in New Zealand” and “Study in New Zealand” and tweaked the language slightly, so that the labels were more generic.
I then created four separate sorts in OptimalSort:Round 1: No description: Each card showed a heading only — this functioned as the control sort
Round 2: Site section in description: Each card showed a heading with the site section in the description
Round 3: Short description: Each card showed a heading with a short description — these were taken from the New Zealand Now topic landing pages
Round 4:Link in description: Each card showed a heading with a link to the current content page on the New Zealand Now website
For each sort, I recruited 30 participants. Each participant could only take part in one of the sorts.
What the results showed
An interesting initial finding was that when we queried the participants following the sort, only around 40% said they noticed the tooltip descriptions and even fewer participants stated that they had used them as an aid to help complete the sort.
Of course, what people say they do does not always reflect what they do in practice! To measure the effect that different descriptions had on the results of this sort, I compared how frequently cards were sorted with other cards from their respective site sections across the different rounds.Let’s take a look at the “Study in New Zealand” section that was mentioned above. Out of the five cards in this section,”Where & what to study”, “Everyday student life” and “After you graduate” were sorted pretty consistently, regardless of whether a description was provided or not. The following charts show the average frequency with which each card was sorted with other cards from this section. For example in the control round, “Where & what to study” was sorted with “After you graduate” 76% of the time and with “Everyday day student life” 70% of the time, but was sorted with “Life experiences” or “High quality” each only 10% of the time. This meant that the average sort frequency for this card was 42%.
On the other hand, the cards “High quality” and “Life experiences” were sorted much less frequently with other cards in this section, with the exception of the second sort, which included the site section in the description.These results suggest that including the existing site section in the card description did influence how participants sorted these cards — confirming our prediction! Interestingly, this round had the fewest number of participants who stated that they used the descriptions to help them complete the sort (only 10%, compared to 40% in round 3 and 20% in round 4).Also of note is that adding a link to the existing content did not seem to increase the likelihood that cards were sorted more frequently with other cards from the same section. Reasons for this could include that participants did not want to navigate to another website (due to time-consciousness in completing the task, or concern that they’d lose their place in the sort) or simply that it can be difficult to open a link from the tooltip pop-up.
What we can take away from these results
This quick investigation into the impact of descriptions illustrates some of the intricacies around using additional context in your card sorts, and why this should always be done with careful consideration. It’s interesting that we correctly predicted some of these results, but that in this case, other uses of the description had little effect at all. And the results serve as a good reminder that participants can often be influenced by factors that they don’t even recognise themselves!If you do decide to use card descriptions in your cards sorts, here are some guidelines that we recommend you follow:
Avoid repeating words and phrases, participants may sort cards by pattern-matching rather than based on the actual content
Avoid alluding to a predetermined structure, such as including references to the current site structure
If it’s important that participants use the descriptions to complete the sort, you should mention this in your task instructions. It may also be worth asking them a post-survey question to validate if they used them or not
We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we tested the effects of card descriptions and the results that we got. Would you have done anything differently?Have you ever completed a card sort only to realize later that you’d inadvertently biased your results? Or have you used descriptions in your card sorts to meet a genuine need? Do you think there’s a case to make descriptions more obvious than just a tooltip, so that when they are used legitimately, most participants don’t miss this information?
