Design Technique 14: Card Sorting
If you have a bunch of things to be sorted and you want to figure out how most people will respond to the structure of your ordering system there’s a basic method you might want to check out. Its called Card Sorting and can be a handy tool in information architecture or information design (depending on your terminology). The benefit of using this technique is it gives a broad and fast guide to how you might structure information - perhaps your navigation - and you don’t need to be tied down to it entirely. Of course there are other factors involved. But this gives you a really good idea very cheaply. So how do you go about performing a Card Sort?
First you make up a bunch of cards with all of the terms you want people to sort through. Cards can be kind of fun so try to keep this light hearted, there are no wrong answers for those sorting for you and they should be aware its not a test. You just want a glimpse through their eyes of what they see and perceive given a larger group of terms. So the first step is obviously make up these cards - be concise with your terms and think carefully. Then go find people who represent your users (Jakob Nielssen recommends testing fifteen users) and sit them down in a comfortable location. The next step is simply to ask them to each sort out the cards into groups. Yep just groups of any interpretation. Its entirely their decision which piles turn up at the end of the session.
This might sound dumb - like how many groups are you going to get these people to sort your twenty or so cards into? You might be surprised at the different ways we all see the world in our heads.
When each person returns their cards in groups you might want to give each specific card a value in a spreadsheet. The value is comprised of the number of times the subjects grouped card X or card Y into a certain position. Its open to interpretation how you record or assess these groupings, too. In the end you should have a far better understanding of your users and likely information groupings - for example navigation groupings - they understand.
This has to be much better than just deciding the structure arbitrarily and wondering why you have zero trouble finding a resource on the site while every third person misses it entirely.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:36 am
[...] interesting exercise in information architecture (called Card Sorting) is to provide a list (or set of cards) of about 15 to 20 items where their logical groupings [...]