Open vs closed vs Hybrid card sort

Overview

Decode's Card Sort block supports three states: Open, Closed, and Hybrid. This determines whether participants sort your cards into categories you've already defined, or create their own categories as they go.

Open

In an Open card sort, you provide the cards, but participants create their own categories and place the cards into whichever categories they come up with.

Use this when you don't yet know how people naturally think about your content, and want to discover it rather than confirm it. For example, if you're planning a new website's navigation from scratch, an Open sort shows you the categories your users would actually create, rather than the ones your team assumes make sense.

The trade-off is that results are messier to analyze, since every participant may create different categories with different names, so there's more interpretation involved in finding the patterns.

Closed

In a Closed card sort, you define both the cards and the categories in advance. Participants simply place each card into the category they feel it belongs to, they can't create new categories of their own.

Use this when you already have a structure, whether live or proposed, and want to know whether it makes sense to real users. For example, if you're adding a new product line to an existing e-commerce site, a Closed sort shows you where users expect the new items to go within categories you've already built.

Results are easier to analyze than Open, since everyone is sorting into the same fixed categories, but a Closed sort can't tell you whether your categories themselves are right, only whether people can use them once they exist.

Hybrid

Hybrid combines both: you define the categories in advance, but participants can also create their own if needed. This gives you the ease of analysis from a Closed sort, while still leaving room for participants to surface a category you didn't think of.

Use this when you have a working structure you're fairly confident in, but want to leave room to discover something you didn't anticipate.

Set the state

In the Card Sort block's Configure panel, under State, select Open, Closed, or Hybrid. Add your categories under Categories using Add Category. Add your cards under Cards using Add Card.

What to do next

To learn about the other Card Sort settings, Image, Hide Title, Randomize, and Limit Card In A Category, see Card sorting in Decode.