How we updated our Card Sorting Results UI

Last week we introduced our Product UX Research team, Rose and Becky, and delved into how they kicked off the product research process within UserZoom.

This week, let’s ask the team to share what research they’ve been carrying out on UserZoom, the methodologies used, and a glimpse at the results of those user-centred design decisions.

What research have you done for UserZoom so far?

We’ve helped support some of the testing around the iconography in the Study Builder. We’ve supported the panelist portal branding research. However a massive part of the last few weeks has been supporting the Results team with the update to the Card Sort Results UI.

The following image documents that journey over the last 12 weeks across the design sprints, and showing some of the questions that the design team asked.

Quite early on, there was some unknowns around the Card Sort. An example of this was, “how should we measure the time on task for an open card sort?” A little bit later, we wondered, “What actually is the best practice for analyzing a card sort online?” Could we produce something that tells you what the best steps would be? What do people ideally want to do when they analyze a card sort?”

So with these first proposals, we helped the design team build wireframes by testing them and validating the new UI.

Questions and methodologies

As a showcase for the variety of research methodologies we used at this stage, here’s a little breakdown of how we answered each of the following questions:

“How to measure the task time for Open Card Sort?”

Method: UserZoom Survey

Due to the way you can build Open Card Sorts in UserZoom there were a couple of different ways we could report the time on task – so we ran a survey to get feedback on what researchers wanted the time on task to reflect.

“What is the process for analysing Card Sort data online?”

Method: Literature review of best practices

We conducted literature searches to see if there were any published articles on best practice. And also ran online searches to look at other UX articles and blogs published. With all this information I looked for the consistent steps across the sources to create an ‘ideal’ user journey for analysing card sort data. The Design team use this to refer to when creating the UI and discussing with Engineering what data we need to provide to the user.

“Can researchers still find what they need to analyse card sorts in the new UI?”

Method: Remote Unmoderated Usability Tests (Advanced UX Project Type with Screen and Audio)

We tested the very early wireframes the Design Team came up with for the new Open and Closed Card Sort Results. Using an Invision prototype we worked with the Design team to set up a test to check that the information presented in the new UI and terminology were clear, that participants understood what was being shown and they weren’t missing any information that would prevent them from analysing a card sort.

How do researchers use Analyse Cluster?

Method: Interviews with researchers (recorded in UserZoom using the Moderated module)

We wanted to understand more about the usage of this feature so we spoke to researchers and asked about their general process when analysing card sorts in UserZoom to better understand how this feature is used.

How should we phrase the tooltips on Dendrograms?

Method: In the last couple of weeks of the commitment we were supporting the Design Team with building content for the tooltips in the new dendrogram section. We suggested content to explain the parts of the dendrogram and then reviewed the proposed content with our Lead UX Designer, Jorge Aboytes, to make sure the copy was easy to understand but still matched our own tone.

We also helped to support decisions around what features we should include in this release and what would have to wait until later.

Here is the new look Card Sort Results section:

So, since February, we’ve been supporting the Results team doing these little tactical projects. And some of them we knew that we’d be running at the start of the commitment and others have just popped up just when we’re talking, or as the process has been evolving.

But because we’re joining the stand-ups each week, we’re in constant communication with people in design, engineering, and product. And it’s been a bit of a ride, but hopefully we’ve been helpful.

What are the next steps for Product UXR?

We want to get more strategic, more collaborative and share more of our research over time.

So far we’ve been cranking out the research and now we want to spread it out, and give it to you guys as well. We want to do more heuristic evaluations, customer journey maps, solidify our personas, create physical artefacts so that internally we can reference these things and really get to know our customers when we create and build experiences.

Join us next time, where we’ll reveal more projects the team have been working on and the results of that research.