Card Sorting: How to apply it in practice.

In this blog I explain card sorting, why this method is important and how you can use it and how to set it up to improve the menu structure of your website/service. After reading this blog, you can organize a session yourself to learn about this technique.

Why card sorting?

When designing a website/service, card sorting can help you determine the information architecture of your website. Sorting cards is a crucial step to create a good user experience. Above all, card sorting prevents you from determining the menu structure of your website from your point of view as a provider.?

You probably have good ideas about the logical structure of your website but you are not the end-user/customer who visits your website. You want a user-oriented website and card sorting gives you the right input to make your potential customer happy.?

By organizing a card sorting session, the following key points will help you plan a successful activity:

• Select a moderator who is familiar with the content and participants who are the target audience of the content, and who cares about the information.
• Work iteratively with individual participants or small groups of participants (no more than three to five people).
• Limit the total number of participants. After 15 sessions, there are diminishing returns on the insight that can be garnered from card sorts.3
• Use 30 to 100 cards, and allow about 30 minutes for each multiple of 50 cards.
• include blank cards and markers to allow participants to add their own items where needed.
• If there are no consistent patterns emerging after ten card sorts, consider renaming the cards, or reconsider the categories.

Source: Universal Design Methods.

This research method is a powerful and flexible method that can help you understand how people group information, identify how they perceive and describe different information and it helps structure information groups, furthermore it helps with possible ideas for primary or secondary navigation categories. Card sorting is quite easy to facilitate and costs little money and time.

Benefits of Card Sorting.

• Build the information architecture.
• Decide what to put on the homepage
• Label categories and navigation

SET -UP SESSION

1. customary to schedule at least 1 hour for each session. If you have many cards you can make more time.

2. Arrange a suitable room.

• With card sort, you arrange a space where your participant can easily create his information architecture. For example: A conference room works well.

3. Plan to have a facilitator or another usability team member who takes notes as the participant works and thinks aloud. Another option is recording the session.

4. Arrange some little presents to thank the participants for spending the time and effort helping you.

Lead the session.

It is important to be well prepared and to reassure the participants. After all, you don’t want socially desirable answers. Now you are well prepared, you can take the following step by step to make the card sort session into a success.

1.Show the participant the set of cards. Explain to the participant that you are asking for help in finding what information categories should be on the homepage of the site and what these categories are called.

• In an open card sort, explain that you want to see what groupings of cards make sense to the participant, and that you will ask for a name for each group of cards once the participant has grouped them.
• If you are conducting a closed card sort, explain that you want to see how the participant thinks the cards fit within the defined groups.

2. In the process you may ask him to talk out loud. This way you gain insight into his thinking, reasoning and frustrations in a simple way.

3. Let the participant work. Minimize interruptions and encourage the participant to think aloud. Allow the participant to do the following:

• Add cards - for example, to indicate lateral hyperlinks or additional topics.
• Put cards aside to indicate topics the participant would not want on the site.

4. When the participant is finished, check that the participant has not created too many groups. If there are too many groups, ask to combine some groups with each other.

5. Ask to label (name) each category.

• In a card sort session, give the participant a stack of different colored cards. Now ask the participant for the colored cards to name the groups. Carefully ask what words they expect when they see a home page or a second-level page that leads the participant to a particular group of content items.
• In a closed card sort, ask for the word expectations. Their latest card organizations and follow up questions provide valuable information about their mindset.

6. The session is now ended. You kindly thank the participant and give him a small present for participating.

Analyze your data.

1. If you used physical cards for the test, either photograph the sort or use the numbers on the cards to quickly record what the participant did. Photograph or write down the names the participant gave to each grouping and the numbers of the cards the participant included under that name. Then you can reshuffle the cards for the next session.

• Create a computer file for each session to gather a complete picture of the detailed site map each user creates.
• Work from your original list of topics and move topics around to recreate each participant's groupings and enter that participant's name for the groupings.
• If you used a physical card sort, you can also take a photograph of the finished card sort for reference later.

5. For a less detailed analysis of the results, use your notes and recordings of the participants' names and card numbers under each person's name to find commonalities from different sessions

After you analyze the data from card sorting, you should have useful information for structuring the information architecture of the site. You should use the results of your card sort to help you define the navigation of your site.

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you found it interesting and that you can now put it into practice. If you want more information in the future regarding UX methods related subjects, please follow me on Linkedin. Have a wonderful day!