Method
Hybrid Card Sort
Participants
12 agents
Context
B2B enterprise platform
Cards
31 Cards
The Problem
A B2B platform was being built by multiple product teams working in parallel. Each team was developing features independently, without a shared understanding of how agent workflows connected across the platform. The business needed to understand how agents naturally grouped, sequenced, and linked their work before the application's architecture could be finalized.
Research Questions
How do agents mentally organize the tasks, actions, data, and workflows that make up their day?
Where do they see connections between different parts of their work
Where do they expect information to flow from one stage to the next?
Why This Method
A moderated hybrid card sort allowed agents to sort existing concepts and introduce new ones. A closed sort would have imposed the business's assumptions onto the findings. Keeping it hybrid meant agents could surface connections and reasoning that a purely quantitative approach would have missed. Twelve agents across different market backgrounds participated.
What We Found
Agents consistently described their work as a lifecycle rather than a set of parallel buckets. A task that began in one context generated data and actions that fed directly into the next stage.
Eleven of twelve agents duplicated cards across multiple categories. Agents also added three categories beyond those supplied. Both signals confirmed the mental model was sequential and interconnected, not hierarchical.
Impact
The findings provided the evidence that created a core feature of the platform. Beyond that single outcome, the research gave the product teams a mental model of how agents actually went about their work and the way they categorized certain tasks. That model provided clarity on how all of the disparate experiences across the platform should fit together, something the teams had been trying to figure out independently before the research gave them a shared answer.