What is the agreement matrix? – Maze Help

The agreement matrix clusters cards under each category based on their highest agreement rates.

The agreement rate is the percentage of users who placed a card in a certain category in a card sort. Learn more about the agreement rate

The rows in the matrix correspond to the cards on a card sorting block. The columns correspond to each category. Each cell indicates the agreement rate for each card across every category.

The most popular results appear at the top, and agreement rates drop as you navigate towards the bottom.

The darker the cell color, the higher the agreement rate for the card in the category.

How to use the agreement matrix

The agreement matrix gives your team a visual representation of how often users agree that a card belongs in each category.

For instance, consider the example screenshot below:

We can see at a glance three clusters with higher agreement rates: one for cards under "Desserts", the other for cards under "Snacks", and the last one for "Dinner".

This tells us the specific cards most testers agree belong to those categories (e.g. most users agree that "Avocado Quesadilla" belongs to "Snacks". It also gives us a clue about those testers' preferred categorization (e.g. "Lunch"/"Dinner"/"Snacks" are more popular categories than "Meat"/"Vegan and Vegetarian").

As we pan through the matrix, we see more scattered results, corresponding to the cards and categories with the lowest agreement rates.

These are also significant. For instance, we see that categorizing along seasons (i.e. "Spring", "Summer"...) doesn't seem particularly meaningful for testers. This reflects the fact that categorizing in this way is highly subjective, and should be avoided since the categories would mean something different to each user.