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How to use the Studies Organizer to effectively organize your studies
How to use the Studies Organizer to effectively organize your studies

Create studies, organize them into folders, manage folders and filter and search for your studies.

Updated over a week ago

Studies and folders

The Optimal Workshop suite allows researchers to conduct user research through the creation of multiple user studies. Studies can be placed into folders giving you the flexibility to organize them as you wish. You can also organize multiple studies at a time by bulk selecting the studies you want, then choosing an action from the top menu.

The needs of every organization differs, but some common organizational schemes might be:

  • Grouped by project

  • Organized by customer or client

  • Organized by individual teams or staff members.  

The main interface for creating and managing studies and folders can be accessed via the ‘Studies’ tab. Here, you can filter the page to find the studies you’re looking for, or move studies into folders to keep your work organized. 

All studies tab

This overview list provides a view of all your studies and folders, as well as how many studies are in each folder, when they were last modified, and who the owner of the study or studies is. 

By default, you’re shown a top level view of all your folders. You will also see any studies that have not yet been sorted into folders. You can control this view using the sort, search and filtering capabilities.

Summary information

Once you’ve clicked on a folder, the list displays information about the studies inside, and provides edit and management functionality. The information displayed and the controls provided will differ based on:

  • Whether the item is a folder or a study

  • The study type e.g., Treejack, OptimalSort etc

  • The status of the study e.g., draft, active or complete.

Folder details

In the above image, you can see a list of the project folders in your account, how many studies are in each folder, who has contributed studies to that folder, and when studies in that folder were last modified. 

Once you click on a project folder on the Studies page, it will open to show you the individual studies inside (pictured below).

Study details

The information provided about studies depends on the status of the study:

Draft status

 Live status

 Complete status

Reframer

Folders

Folder are used to house one or more related studies. A folder may contain as many studies as you wish.   

Currently, folders may only house studies — storing folders within folders is not supported.

Creating folders

You can create a new folder by clicking the “Create project folder” button.  

 You will be prompted to give the Folder a name. 

Once you’ve given it a name, the new folder will appear in the overview list ready for you to add studies to it.

You can open a folder either by clicking on its name or anywhere on its line in the table. When you do so the overview list changes to show the contents of that folder. You can navigate back to all your studies by pressing ‘Back to all studies’.

Studies

Create studies to conduct research into user behavior and to analyze and report upon the results of that research. The content of any given study varies based upon the tool you are using, however they’re all created and managed in the same way.

Creating a new study

You can create a study by clicking on the “Create new study” button and choosing the type of study you wish:

  • Treejack: Tree testing identifies where people are getting lost in the content of your site.

  • OptimalSort: Card sorting helps you understand how people would organize your content.

  • Chalkmark: First click testing captures your users’ initial impressions of yours websites designs.

  • Questions: ask questions of users and collect their responses.

  • Reframer: Make notes and observations during user research sessions, identify themes and trends faster.

Here you can pick which folder you want your study to belong to, create a new folder, or leave your study unsorted. Once you’ve picked the tool, given your study a name and put it in a folder, you’ll be taken to the Setup tab for your new study. 

For more information about setting up studies, check out the Help Center articles for each tool:

Moving studies

To move studies into different folders, go to the individual study in the list and press the ‘Actions’ dropdown. You can move your study into an existing folder or create a new folder in the modal. 

Filtering

This section allows you to reduce the information displayed in the overview list to match your applied filter. You can filter by study type “Tools and methods”, study configuration status “Study status” and study author “Created by”. 

Applying a filter

Clicking a filter option will immediately apply it and the overview list will update to match your selection. Multiple filter choices can be applied simultaneously if you wish.

In the example below, filters have been used to find all folders that contain draft card sorts or surveys.

Clearing Filters

Filters can be removed either by clicking on the label again to deselect, or by clicking “Clear filters” at the top of the filter section. The overview list will update immediately to reflect your changes.

Sort and search

Sort by

The order in which your studies are displayed can be controlled using the ‘Sort by’ dropdown list with options to sort by - Alphabetical order, Last modified date and Created date. You can reverse the sort order by pressing the arrow icon next to the dropdown. 

The search functionality works in conjunction with any filters you’ve applied, making it easy to restrict your search to the type of study you’re looking for. That said, if you wish to search across all of your studies, be sure to remove any filters you have applied.

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