Tools for research and testing

Tree testing checks a structure you have already designed. Participants see your navigation as a plain text outline and are given a task, such as finding out how to replace a lost card, then click through to where they expect the answer to be. Card sorting tells you how people would organise things; tree testing tells you whether the organisation you built actually works. They are usually run in that order.

For card sorting, patterns start to appear around 15 participants and are usually stable by 30. Adding people past that rarely changes the grouping. For tree testing, 15 to 20 people per task set is enough to see which tasks fail. These are small numbers because you are looking for patterns in behaviour, not measuring a population.

No. You send a link and they start. There is no sign-up, no email address collected and no cookie set for them. You do not need an account either — a study is created and reached through its link.

Yes, and there is no trial period, no watermark on exports and no limit on responses. I built these tools for my own client work, where the paid platforms cost more than the projects justified, and left them open.

An agreement score for every card, showing how consistently people filed it in the same place; a similarity matrix showing how often each pair of cards was grouped together; a dendrogram that clusters the cards and lets you adjust where you cut it; and the category names participants invented, merged where identical. Everything exports to CSV or JSON.

Studies and responses are stored in a Postgres database. Responses contain what participants clicked and how long they took — no names, no email addresses, no tracking. You can delete a study and all its responses at any time, and deletion is immediate and permanent.

Yes. Each study has two links: one for participants, and a private one for you that opens the analysis. You can also publish the results, which produces a third link that shows the analysis to anyone who opens it while keeping the ability to edit or delete the study with you.

Keep it somewhere. The link is what proves the study is yours, and it is also stored in the browser that created the study — so if you still have that browser, your results are still reachable. If you lose both, get in touch and I can recover it.