Methodology and results of a card sorting study for SMB editorial content.

1. SMB Community Hub Categories
Research Report
Round 1 Card Sort Testing
VERSION 1.0
November 2017
David Wallis
Peta Bellamy

2. 1. Background
2. Testing Goals
3. Methodology
4. Headlines
5. Summary of Results
6. Recommendations
2
Contents

3. Background
3

4. 4
Background
As part of the SMB Community Hub project, Isentia proposed a set of
categories that were based on their content strategy:
Better Business Better Life
Better Together Better You

5. 5
Background
A card sorting study was conducted to validate these categories and
discover how users would self categorise without prompting.
An example of a news website open card sort
Natural Environment

6. Testing Goals
6

7. • To assess whether the proposed categories align
to our users’ mental models. Therefore, will they
be able to find content via these category names.
(Better Business, Better Life, Better Together, Better You)
7
Testing Goals
• Discover how participants would naturally group
and label content without prompting.

8. Methodology
8

9. 9
Study Design
Content
groupings
16 articles

10. 3 types of online card sorting activity
10
Study Design
Open card sort
n=40
User-defined categories
Hybrid card sort
n=67
Pre-defined categories
+
optional user-defined
categories
Closed card sort
n=65
Pre-defined categories

11. 172 Participants
11
Study Design
• Recruited from the ODA panel.
• Self-identified as medium business (6 – 150)
owners or decision makers.

12. Headlines
12

13. • Participants did not group articles consistently under
the pre-defined categories (“Better Business” etc)
13
Headlines
• When users were able to create their own categories,
different category names emerged, based on
commonly used business terms.
i.e. Finance, Marketing, Culture, Self Improvement
• Under these user-defined categories, articles were
grouped much more consistently.

14. Summary of Card Sort
Results
14

15. 15
Closed Card Sort
• 16 articles sorted into 4 fixed categories
• 65 participants
Example grouping:

16. 16
Closed Card Sort
Results Matrix
Intended
Category
Not ideal – mixed response
78% of participants
placed this article in a
category that was not
intended for it.
Even distribution between
categories shows lack of
consensus on which
category this article
belongs to.
Number of participants
who grouped an article
under each category

17. 17
Closed Card Sort
Results Matrix
Ideal - clear category
winner
Majority of participants
grouped this article under
Better Business, showing
that it was the most
appropriate category
available.Intended
Category

18. 18
Hybrid Card Sort
• 16 articles sorted into 4 fixed categories + any amount of optional extra categories
• 67 participants
Optional user-defined
categories
Example grouping:

19. 19
Hybrid Card Sort
Dendogram
Articles were grouped
consistently by most
participants, yet
there was no
consensus on what
those groups should
be called.
Eg. The two different
groupings highlighted
on the left show that
participants used the
same 3 labels for both
categories.

20. 20
Open Card Sort
• 16 articles sorted into user-defined categories
• 40 participants
All categories are user-
defined. Participants
were free to create any
amount of groups.
Example grouping:

21. 21
Open Cart Sort
Categories
Finance
• A guide to financial forecasting for SMBs
• Financial forecast: 6 simple steps
• A helping hand: Government grants for SMBs
• Financial forecasting: How far into the future
should you look?
• 7 tips to getting paid on time
HR, Culture, Company Morale
• 5 steps to auditing your company culture
• 4 tips on how to leave work at work
• Communicating change: Are you doing it right?
• The one way to turn the tide on low morale
• Give your ideas some legs: The positive effects
of walking meetings
• Why you should put a ping-pong table in your
break room
Personal Development, Self Improvement
• When is an MBA worth it?
• CIO or IT Manager: what job are you really
doing?
• How to pitch new tech to your boss like a pro
Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Social Media
• Is now the time to automate your marketing?
• How to analyse your competitors on Instagram
• Top 10 tech leaders to follow on Twitter

22. 22
What is a dendogram?
Dendograms represent Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. Cards
that were viewed as most similar by the participants in the
study have been grouped close together.
Open Card Sort - Dendogram
Dendogram
Finance
Marketing
HR, Culture
Personal Development

23. Recommendations
23

24. • Simpler is better
Name categories using language that SMBs use themselves.
eg. Better life > Work-life, Wellbeing, Health
eg. Better you > Personal Development, Personal Improvement, Career
24
Recommendations
Finance CulturePersonal DevelopmentMarketing
IT FutureSelf Improvement Tech Tips WellbeingHR
Work Life
Better Business Better TogetherBetter You Better Life
• Split Better Business.
• Retain the same groupings for the others, and change the labels.
Strike a balance between user-expected labelling and the content pillars. For example:
• Run the open card sort study again when we have more content.
The above categories may change when there are more articles. Other themes did appear
in the open card sort, which may become stronger depending on the variety of content.

25. Thank you
25