Card sorting results help you understand how people naturally group and label information, revealing how your content structure aligns or conflicts with users’ mental models. By analyzing these results, you can uncover patterns in how participants organize items, identify areas of strong agreement or confusion, and make informed decisions about navigation, labeling, and information architecture.
This article walks through how to interpret common card sorting outputs and translate data into clear, actionable insights for improving your product’s structure and usability.
By Cards
The default results show how participants placed each card item to given categories. You can toggle the categories to show the percentage breakdown for each category. The Agreement % displays the highest percentage that participants grouped the item to.
In the example above, you can see the card "Accommodations" with 75% agreement. This means that 3 out of 4 participants (75%) have agreed to categorize this card under "Components of Travel".
By Categories
You can also view results by how participants placed items for a given category through the Categories tab. Expanding the view shows what card items were placed under each category. The agreement % shows the average percentage of all the cards that were placed in a given category.
In the example above, you can see five different cards were placed under "Resources for Planning". The 45% agreement is calculated by the sum of the percentages for each card / number of cards placed in a category.
So for this example: 75 + 50 + 50 + 25 + 25 / 5 card items = 225 / 5 = 45 agreement percentage.
By Analysis
Pictures are often more effective than long explanations, and this is especially true when making sense of card sorting results. Visualizations help surface patterns and relationships that can be hard to spot in raw data. Two key visualizations are provided: the agreement matrix and the similarity matrix.
For each visualization, you can hover over a cell to see the exact numbers.
Agreement Matrix
This matrix groups cards under each category based on where participants most consistently placed them. The agreement rate shows the percentage of participants who placed a card into a specific category, with darker green indicating higher levels of agreement.
Similarity Matrix
This matrix shows the percentage of participants who grouped each pair of cards together. Cards that were frequently grouped together appear closer in the visualization, and darker green indicates stronger agreement among participants.
- You can also download any visuals and images as png files.
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