CardZort Zone

What is card sorting?

Card sorting is an interviewing technique that allows designers to explore the user's mind to discover what and where they see things together in a hierarchical structure such as a menu. It is grounded on the idea that the organization of information on user interfaces should be based on the cognitive models of users rather than the intuition of designers. Its main goal is to assist in the creation of structures that will enhance the probability of users being able to find information.

Card sorting consists of the following steps:

1. Identify the set of keywords/topics to be categorized.
2. Write each keyword/topic on an index card.
3. For each user
   1. Shuffle the cards and have the user organize the cards into piles.
   2. After the piles are created, the user is asked to give each pile a meaningful name.
   3. Collect and analyze the groupings obtained from the users to identify commonalities among them. This is generally achieved by running a cluster analysis algorithm over the data.

The technique is time consuming to apply (especially with large sets of cards) and its results can be tedious to analyze if the data have to be transcribed to the computer to analyze the groupings.