Card Sorting
User Experience Researcher | March 2023
How can we identify how many of our users understand the terms provided in our product's onboarding process?
Overview
Our UX Research team needed to validate the assumption that users understood the PAT organization of the product line hierarchy for administration, onboarding, and scoped search.
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Previous research shows that different LOBs organize their products differently, although our product requires users to complete the Product Line Hierarchy to be assigned to the correct Product Owner.​
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We needed to learn how much they did know about the Product Line Hierarchy so we could find the best way for our product users to efficiently and intuitively find the correct product to assign a request to.
The Research Process
01 Outline Research Objectives
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Our Research Outline Provided:
1. Our Product's Current Page
2. Research Proposal & Methodology
3. Product Line Hierarchy Definitions
02 Launch Two Unmoderated Card-Sorts
(12 Participants)
We determined the best way to gather a large number of users to show us how well they understood the Product Line Hierarchy and the definitions of each term was to ask all of our users to fill out a card sort.
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The card sort would allow them to assign a title to each definition and show us how they view the order of the Product Line Hierarchy.
Card Sort 01
Card Sort 02
03 Synthesizing Card Sorts
We wanted our users to provide unbiased opinion and feel free to guess if they felt stuck on an answer. We understood that if they do not know the definition of these terms that it is not their fault and just meant we needed to find a new way for our users to learn.
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Synthesizing Card Sort 01
Outcome
Our synthesis showed us that only 38% of Requestors answered correctly.
Less than 50% of of Requestors understand the correct order of the Product Line Hierarchy.
Synthesizing Card Sort 02
04 Follow-up User Interviews (2 Requestors & 2 Product Owners)
Followed up with 4 participants from card sort to understand what made sense to them and what was difficult for them to answer. We asked them to walk us through the Request a Feature page within Feature Request how their understanding of the Product Line Hierarchy aligns with this screen.
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Deliverables used during User Interviews:
1. Discussion Guide
2. Shared screen to discuss our Product's current page
05 Synthesizing User Interviews
Broke down each participants' pain points, needs, wants / desires into sections and paired them based on similar themes.
06 Analysis & Recommendations
Based on our synthesized answers from user interviews and card sorts, we came to the conclusion that there are too many "big words" that hold little meaning to our participants.
Filling out the Product Line Hierarchy in order to submit to our product is "extra work" for them with little pay off, as some of them have found they end up submitting to the incorrect Product Owner.
Outcome
Understanding our users' minimal understanding of the Product Line and learning that they have become frustrated with having to fill out extra work when using our product.
The Product Tooling Team is currently undergoing a new design that will accommodate to our user's feedback. Our team is focusing on how we can provide an easier ways to find the correct Product Owner without having to fill out a surplus of information.
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This is an ongoing process so at this moment we are TBD on how that will look for our users.