This guide will walk you through your Card Sort study results. 

Once the study has collected responses, go to “Card Sorts” via the sidebar menu. Each card sort question will show up in an individual tab.

For each Card Sort question, you can download a .csv file of the individual participant responses:

The data for each card will be shown across a set of three columns in the csv export. Each participant’s response will be shown on an individual row.

Column D: The column header will provide the text description of the first card, and the rows below will list the text description of the category into which each participant sorted that card.

Column E: This column will show the position of the category into which the card from the previous column was sorted in relation to the other categories. 

For example, a “2” means that this participant sorted the card into the second category in the list.

Column F: This column will show the rank position of the card in relation to the other cards that were placed in the same category. 

For example, a “3” means that the participant placed two other cards above the current card in the same category.

Columns G, H, I will repeat the same data for the subsequent card; and so on. 

Back in the Card Sort tab, you can “Show participant data filter”.

Selecting this checkbox expands this section with the participant grid for this card sort. Each participant response is again shown on an individual row.

The third column “Included in Results” allows you to manually exclude any participants from all study results based on the responses they have provided.

Further down the Card Sort tab, the “Card Sorting Common Stats” section summarizes the high-level insights for this card sort.

The Card Sorting Similarity Matrix shows you how frequently each card was placed into the same category. Each box represents a pair of cards based on the corresponding labels for each row and column. The boxes with higher numbers and warmer colors indicate pairs of higher similarity.

Below the matrix, you can set the matrix to display the data as percentages of included participants instead of raw numbers.

You can download the matrix as a .csv file for further custom analyses or styling:

The .csv export will contain the same data as shown in the dashboard. Note that the matrix is also mirrored across the center diagonal (blue dotted line).

Towards the bottom of the Card Sort tab, you can review the Card Sorting Dendrogram.

A dendrogram is the quintessential cluster analysis output. It is a visualization of the distances between nodes using a mathematical technique based on the similarity matrix. The more times an item is sorted together with another item, the more similar they are. They then appear closer in proximity in the dendrogram.

Additional card sorting resources from our blog: