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Guides for running card sorts in SortedResearch, from setting up your first study to reading the results and sharing them with your team.
Getting started
SortedResearch runs card sorting studies: you give participants a set of cards (items, features, topics), they sort them into groups that make sense to them, and the platform turns the results into clear analysis and a Graham-written insight report (Graham is the platform's AI assistant). It's used to design information architecture, navigation, taxonomies, and content groupings.
Creating a study
Click New study on the dashboard. You'll set:
Pairwise projects
Pairwise is the second kind of project you can run in SortedResearch, alongside card sorts. Where a card sort shows how people group things, a pairwise project ranks a list of needs on what matters to you, most often how much each one matters to people and how well those needs are met today, or on a question you write yourself. It does this by asking participants lots of simple two-at-a-time questions ("which of these matters more to you?") and turning the answers into a ranking.
The screener
A screener is an optional set of questions shown before the card sort, used to qualify or disqualify participants and to manage quotas. Build it in the study's Screener tab. If you add no questions, participants go straight to the sort.
Sharing & launching
Transitions (on the Share & publish tab): Draft → Go live → Live; Live → Pause → Paused; Paused → Go live; any state → Close study; Closed → Reopen as draft (back to an editable draft).
The participant experience
This is what someone sees when they open your study link. Participants never sign in and never see Graham or your dashboard.
Analysis & results
Open a study and go to its results to explore how participants sorted. All analysis is computed live in your browser, so sliders and filters update instantly.
Reports & exports
Graham writes a plain-English insight report for your study. It covers:
How many responses do I need?
Graham uses this to recommend a target number of completed responses for each study. The goal is enough participants for stable, trustworthy groupings, without paying to recruit people you don't need.
Graham's smarts (AI features)
The AI throughout SortedResearch is Graham. He works in a few specific places, and every Graham feature degrades gracefully: if he's briefly unavailable, the platform falls back to a sensible non-AI behavior and nothing is ever blocked. Graham's group-naming, quality checks, screener import, and insight reports are paid-plan features (Individual and up); the Free plan gets one view-only insight report and Graham chat.
Plans & billing
> Note: billing ships with the platform build. Keep this article in step with the live pricing, quotas, and Stripe flows as they're implemented.
Data, privacy & security
Every researcher only ever sees their own studies and data. Access is enforced at the database level, with row-level security scoped to the study owner, so there is no way to reach another account's studies, even through the API.
Troubleshooting & FAQ
A network sent too many actions in a short window (rate limiting). It clears within about a minute. This usually only happens with many participants on the same office/campus network at once, or automated testing. Normal use never hits it.