Answer: If you’re building out a Card Sorting exercise in a survey of yours, you can create skip logic or delayed compound branching off of another survey question(s) or other variables so that certain respondents don’t have to see the Card Sorting exercise. Within the Card Sorting question type, there is no way for us to manually implement show/hide questions or show/hide response logic. Though if you had no choice, you could put in a request to our Services team and they can use scripting to implement the show/hide logic that you need.

Answer: Currently it is not possible to link categories to other components in the same survey, whether you’re applying closed or open card sorting. Though we are looking to add that as a product enhancement later this year. Workarounds for this are to follow up with arbitrary open-ended questions (e.g. Please elaborate on why you selected the following cards to be assigned into these categories.) If you want to ask an open-ended question for the respondent to comment on, but focuses on specific cards/items and categories, you can review your data and then follow up or re-contact these respondents (w/ the contact information that you have available for these respondents) and ask to provide comment to specific categorizing they did.

Answer: Just like any exercise that involves advanced analytics, card sorting can be applied during any part of the survey. Though ideally, you want to save it towards the middle or end sections of a survey, that way respondents will have a slightly better sense of the circumstances of what these cards/items represent, based on previous questions asked in the same survey. That way, your insights will be much stronger when you do the analysis afterward.

Answer: Closed card sorting is when you’re seeking out more evaluative insights whereas open card sorting is for getting more ‘generative’ insights in your research. So if you’re creating something from scratch, whether that’s a website, or an inventory, or an agenda for upcoming market research projects for your panel/community, but don’t have the foresight to really know how your target audience perceives these items (products, services, concepts, etc.), then Open Card sorting might be more useful for you. In the case where you want to study how your target audience categorizes things over time, or if you’re looking to pinpoint misleading or unclear labels, or if you’re trying to reduce the number of categories of items for a website/inventory/market research agenda/etc., then closed card sorting might be more beneficial for you.

Another important thing to call out is that you cannot use open card sorting when evaluating item hierarchy. For example, if you’re categorizing items based on the level of priority or usage among your target audience, these categories would have to be pre-defined, whereas, in open card sorting, the respondent categories items, and then they create the labels themselves.

Answer: Card sorting is great if you think you need to reorganize your inventory so it’s easier for your customers to navigate, not just online but in-stores, across any industry. Additionally, as a market researcher, you can identify what your target panelists/audience find as high priority versus not, or how a product/service/concept is associated with their lifestyle and you can prioritize and filter your audience for upcoming projects on specific products/services/concepts, whether they already exist and are known to the public, or if they’re a prodigy or new product/service/concept in the pipeline.