Card Sorting: What real people want

It's cheap, it's fun, and it works.

Card sorting is one of the best tools in the toolbox used by web architects to craft sites for real people.

The results enable us to cut through entrenched thinking about content (both ours and our client's) so that we might craft a navigation and organization system that meets the needs of our target audience.

Best of all, it engages everyone in the process of building a new website. 

What is card-sorting? How does it work?

If you're new to the idea, Boxes and Arrows has a detailed introduction to card sorting. In essence, card sorting is an affinity exercise that reveals patterns and relationships between information. In our case, website information.

Here's what I tell participants about card sorting:

• You'll get a stack of about 50 cards. The cards represent content and functionality for the Client X website.
• All you need to do is sort the cards into groups that make sense to you (There's no wrong answer). If you want, you can work on the exercise together with a friend.
• At the end of the exercise (about 20 minutes), you'll have a pile of cards that look like this:

Sounds easy, doesn't it?  In most cases, people are happy to help. And decision-makers on the project are happy to have real user data.

Parsing the results

After 7-8 card sorts, I typically start seeing patterns.

For example, in a card sort for a city government website, I noticed that participants clustered Mayor and City Council information into one category called "Government." They also clustered Library information with Senior Center information (plus other topics) into one category called "Community." In the end, we ended up with seven high-level categories:

• City Services
• Community
• Arts & Recreation
• Transportation
• Environment & Health
• Business
• Safety
  

Consistently, card sorting participants clustered information into these groups and used similar language to name each category. That's powerful user feedback.

Additional reading:

• Card Sorting: A Definitive Guide
  
• Card Sorting to Discover the User's Model of the Information Space
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-scale Websites
• Understanding information taxonomy helps build better apps