This article tells you how to use the participants table to:

The Participants table displays useful information about every participant who started your card sort, and can be used to filter your data.

Participants who complete the card sort are automatically placed in the ‘included in results’ table. Those who don’t complete all tasks (or are rejected by our recruitment panel if you've used it), are placed in the ‘excluded from results’ table.

Participants are automatically marked as 'abandoned' when they don't complete the card sort - this happens if they've exited out of the study or the study has timed out. By default, these participants are not included in your results. The same goes for participants who put every single card in one group, or who put each card in its own group. This is because it can skew your data and is usually an indicator that a participant is not fully engaged in the study.

You can choose to exclude participants by selecting them with the checkbox, and clicking the “exclude selected participants” button. This will send them to the “excluded from results” table.

When you first look at your results, it's a good idea to review the data in this table to make sure participants meet your own standards as well. You might, for example, see that a participant completed the card sort in under two minutes, and you know that if they took it seriously, it should've taken 10 minutes. Removing these participants will tighten up your results.

You'll be able to see by the percentages of cards sorted and categories created that participants haven't finished yet. If it shows 0% for both, it means no cards have been moved at all, and participants probably haven't started it.

If you used our in-app recruitment service, you'll notice that some participants in the "included" table are flagged. This happens when the tool has picked up that the participant may not have completed the study correctly, i.e. they did it too fast or too slow, put all cards in one category, or created a category for each card.

If a participant is flagged, have a quick look through their data and if you want to replace them, you can do so in-app by clicking the "Replace participant" button.

An effective approach to analyzing your card sorting results might involve looking at the results of different demographics separately.

To segment and reload your results based on participant identifiers or URL tokens, look in the table for the identifier or token, and select them all using the check box. You can filter your results by clicking ‘Filter to selected participants’. The filter will now be applied across your results.

If your participants completed a screener survey or pre- or post-study questions that had pre-set answers (like multi-choice), you can segment your results based on their answers.

Press the ‘Add filter’ button at the top of the page and select ‘Question response’, then choose the question and response you want to filter to. Press ‘Apply filter’ to reload the results to your new criteria.