Card Sorting
summary | detail | methodology
Card sorting is a research and design technique that helps uncover user assumptions about how information is connected and structured. In a typical project, participants sort cards containing names of content areas, tasks, documents, or even images associated with the information into groups that seem logical to them. Optionally, they provide names for the groups they’ve created.
When to Choose This Method
Card sorting is an effective way to learn about users’ expectations for finding information in a website, intranet, extranet, software application, documentation set, or other information product. Card sorting can be used for exploration, to learn how users themselves would organize the information, or for verification, to test categories and category names that you have developed.
Primarily used when developing new—or extensively revised—websites or products, card sorting can also improve mature sites and products that have established structures, navigation, and terminology. The results can uncover the need for access to information through supplementary and specialized indices, guided tours for particular types of users, demos for specific tasks, and alternative terms in a comprehensive index or glossary.
What You Can Learn From This Method
Card sorting can reveal users’ “mental models” of a website, intranet, or other information product. For example, you can learn how users visualize the structure of a website, what types of content they expect to find there, where they expect to find it, and how they expect to navigate to it. The results can inform decisions about site organization, navigation, terminology, site map, specialized site indexes, home page content, and more.
Card sorting provides both quantitative and qualitative data on which to base design decisions. For example, you can examine how many times any two given cards were grouped together (a high number suggests the grouped content should appear in the same content area), and then examine the names that users gave to the groups in which they placed the pair (common or repeated terms suggest a label for the content area).
What You Cannot Learn From This Method
Although card sorting is conducted with participants who are or who represent actual users, the sessions are abstract exercises rather than realistic, task-based scenarios. To supplement the results, card sorting can be used in conjunction with usability testing for either exploration or verification.
As with other usability methods, it isn’t practical to conduct card sorting to test every navigation label, document type, and content area of a website or product. With 25–40 cards sorted in a typical one-hour session, it’s important to focus on the most important or problematic areas, and to include representative cards that can stand for an entire class of similar cards. Conducting user interviews to supplement card sorting can help “fill in the gaps” by eliciting what additional content areas are important to participants.
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