Randomize your test with section groups

Randomizing the order in which your test sections and/or questions appear to participants is a great way to reduce bias and prevent pattern predictability that may influence user behavior. When your participants can't guess what's coming next, you're more likely to receive real, representative insights that reflect their actual thoughts and behavior.

With Lyssna, you can use section groups to randomize the order in which participants see your tasks and designs, as well as the order of your follow-up questions. You can also use randomization to A/B test your tasks or designs.

You'll need to create a section group. This will allow you to specify which sections you want to be randomized or which sections you want to be included in an A/B test.

1. When building your test, select +Create a group in the top right corner of the sections list:

2. Click Add section. You can then begin adding in your desired test sections.

If you want to randomize a test you've already created, you can add a section group anywhere in the test and then move your existing tasks into it by dragging and dropping from the sidebar:

3. Once you've added your test sections, you'll select whether you want all of your sections displayed in random order, or if participants should be presented with a random subset from the group:

If you want to randomize your entire test, you can simply select Random order. This will ensure all of your sections are show to participants, but not in the same order.

This option works well for navigation or usability tasks where participant perspective may be influenced by the order.

If you want to A/B test your designs, you'll select Random subset and then specify how many sections you want each participant to view.

In addition to randomizing the sections of your test, you can also randomize the order of your follow-up questions within a particular section.

Simply tick the box at the bottom of the section to enable:

You'll need to do this for each of your sections if you want all of your follow-up questions to be randomized.

Can I move an existing section into or out of a group?

Yes! If you want to move a section into or out of a group, it's as easy as dragging and dropping it from the sidebar. This means you can randomize an existing test by creating a section group in it and dragging all of the sections into that group.

Can I randomize the order of section groups themselves?

Section groups keep their position in the test structure while randomizing the sections they contain within them. This lets you show different section orders to participants without changing the overall flow of the test.

Can I use conditional logic with section groups?

Test logic can't yet be used to hide or show sections within a group, but it can be used to show an entire group based on responses from a previous section.

How do I delete a section group?

You can only delete a section group if there are no sections in it. If there are, you'll first need to delete each section individually, or drag them out of the group from the sidebar. Then, the delete option will be available; you can find it by clicking the three dots in the top right corner of the group.