[Card sort] Ranking items on a card sorting exercise

Stack-ranking exercises give you data about your testers’ preferences. They let you see how your testers rank items in a category in terms of how important or important they are.

Enable rankings on a maze

To require testers to rank cards inside a category:

1. Open your draft maze, or create a new one.
2. Click Add block and select Card Sort from the list of blocks. Learn more about card sorting
3. Toggle Require participants to rank cards.
4. If needed, customize the instructions, shuffle the order of the cards, and fine-tune other settings before sending your maze live.

Preview

When going through the maze, participants will be prompted to sort the cards inside the category/categories in order of preference, with the following callout:

The order is important
Rank the cards in each category by placing the most important ones at the top. 

Analyze your results

As testers complete your live maze, you’ll start seeing insights in the Results dashboard.

To learn more about how to visualize and understand your results, check out this article: Understanding your card sorting results

If you’ve enabled rankings on the card sorting block, expand each category in the Results dashboard to see the average ranking of each card inside that category.

The average ranking is a calculation of the average position testers attributed to each card within a category. It’s a sum of the positions assigned to each card by all testers, divided by the number of testers. This calculation is a numerical representation of how testers perceive the relative importance/priority of each item within a category.

Cards are sorted by the agreement rate by default. Click the AVG RANKING header to sort the cards by their ranking inside that category. Learn more about sorting your results

Alternative method: Forced distribution using categories

Alternatively, you can prompt testers to rank cards across categories. This approach can be useful if you want testers to pick a few options and exclude the rest.

1. Open your draft maze, or create a new one.
2. Choose Card Sort from the list of blocks. Learn more about card sorting
3. Add categories corresponding to each rank on the scale—e.g 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice.
4. Set a maximum of 1 card that can be sorted into those categories.
5. If there are more cards than ranking categories, create a category for all remaining cards.
   
6. Add your cards.
7. If needed, customize the instructions, shuffle the order of the cards, and fine-tune other settings before sending your maze live.