The people who you invite to be involved are also super important – not quite as important as the content, but still very important. Small groups of people working in-person around a table is literally the best thing because you can listen to the people and the conversation that they have and that conversation is so much more useful than the actual results that you get. We still could do this remotely, especially if people can get together and you can moderate via video.
Or... I haven't ever done this, but we could kind of do it with a Zoom call and like a MURAL board and get people to poke things around, but it's still – any time that you have a chance to do it face-to-face, do that. And one of the things that I like to do if I need to do remote card sorts is just at least a couple face-to-face because then I can really hear that discussion and understand what's going on with just some of the group and then I can look at the results from the others.
We want to make sure that *the people are also of the same level*. And this goes for any kind of group research or group activities. If you have a boss and somebody much more junior, the junior people will always just defer to the boss. If you have technical people and non-technical people, the non-technical people might just go, 'I don't know!' and follow the technical people. So, you want to make sure that people are at the same kind of levels, and, if you can, the same kinds of work or life situation, or the same kinds of users
because then you can listen to them discuss their experiences and they'll do that better if they're the same types. We do that for most kind of focus groups and things. If you are doing it in-person, just don't try to fill up a room with lots of people. Do it with one group or have one facilitator per group because, as I said, the conversation is the super-useful part of this and it's really worth listening.
What I used to do when I did these in-person is I would kind of just sit up at the end of the table, kind of be typing in results from a previous sort; so, I don't look like I'm hovering over them. I look like I'm busy kind of just listening a bit. But I'm listening to every single word they're saying! So, again, if we're working remotely and we're doing a remote card sort, you still want to have a good representative set of people and see if you can figure out a way of getting
people to work together remotely. Otherwise, they'll just do it by themselves one at a time, and you'll still get good results, but you just won't hear them discussing their reasoning.