Project
As part of a larger discoverability project, there was a strong indication that the existing report categories in HubSpot were not closely aligned with how users organized reports. This mismatch was leading users to search for reports under the wrong reporting tool or name.
I worked with the UX research team to conduct an open card sort to understand how users naturally thought through and organized different report types, instead of giving them preassigned categories to focus on.
Strategy
25 users were invited to complete a card sorting task, where they were presented with a total of 56 cards which reflected the broad types of reporting questions answered across all of HubSpot’s reporting tools. These reporting questions included:
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Most users used a blend of strategies to categorize report types, such as both functional area/keyword and funnel/pipeline stage.
| % users | Strategy Used | Example Categories |
| 50% | Functional Area/Keyword | Blog, Ads, Contacts |
| 38% | Business purpose | Sales Activity, Digital Marketing Efficiency |
| 29% | Funnel/pipeline stage | Lead Gen, Prospect Development |
| 21% | By Hub | Sales, Marketing |
| 17% | Me/My role | My Team, My Performance |
Users were also explicitly asked for the strategy used in completing the card sort. Examples of self-reported methods include:
| “ I thought about the reports I look at daily, weekly, etc., and the metrics I often dig into next after looking at a report. I tried to group all the similar topics together with an easy header name so I could remember. ” “ I first read all the reporting questions, then segregated each of them based on the different stages I use them in. ” “ I grouped them by type of task, or who would be responsible for measuring or reporting these things (e.g., Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, etc.). ” |
Outcome
The majority of cards were grouped into 10 unique categories. The names of the categories reflect the naming convention used by participants in the card sort.
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7 of the 10 categories could be roughly clustered into the two broader headings of Marketing and Sales. Knowledge Base, Contacts/Customers, and Email were unique and generally grouped separately.
These open card sort results were used as the basis of a set of new proposed report categories, as well as in the design prototyping of a new reporting sub-navigation.