card sorting exercise

Card sorting is most often used for information architecture design to structure web pages, but it shouldn't be limited to this purpose only. This format naturally lends itself more towards moderated card sorting, but can also be conducted as unmoderated. Labelling your website content with the terminology of your users will ensure your content is delivered in an intuitive manner for your audience. In a physical card . Now weve discussed what options you have when it comes to card sorting, lets take a look at just how you can plan and execute a successful card sort within UX research. Start with an introduction, give your participants a bit of context and go through the instructions. Like many user research tactics, the aim of the game is to get inside the head of your user, make sure you speak their language and help them find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Consider an open sort as part 1 and a closed sort as part 2 of your process. The more, the better. Have blank cards available for participants to add topics and to name the groups they make when they sort the cards. Keep in mind that if people dont receive an incentive or are not obligated to participate, youll need to invite a whole lot more people than your minimum required. This type of card sorting doesn't reveal how users naturally categorize a set of topics. Facilitate. With the closed card sort categories results, you could: We gave participants nine categories (including Not sure), and we could quickly see high agreement for some categories. tangible cards Alternatively, you can create electronic or handwritten lists of the values listed and then sort them to . Youll run a hybrid card sort like this if you: When you set enough categories for people to sort all the cards into, your hybrid category will lean towards closed. Then you can reshuffle the cards for the next session. Spend just a few minutes scanning the categories people came up with and youll quickly form an impression their mental models (how they perceived the overall theme or concept of your cards). The darker the blue and the larger the cluster, the higher the agreement between participants on which cards go together. Create cards for each item you want your user to categorize. Consider the benefits of requiring participants to complete your sort. Email your participants a link to the study. All of the results are visually represented and easy to read and comprehend. The card sort exercise addresses two key questions: There are multiple handy ways to do that, so you dont have to worry about not getting enough participants. The number of participants who placed the card in that category will tell you something important as well: out of 15 people, 13 people put the bottom two cards into that category, and 15 put the first card in that category. In conclusion, card sorting is an excellent way to get ideas, gain feedback from users and understand how they think, gather insight on potential IA and discover your users mental models. Create your list of content topics. Maze's card sorts helps you learn how your users organize information and what resonates with them. Guillermo Gineste, Senior Product Designer at Maze, suggests today there is little difference between digital and paper card sorting techniques. Instead, we can undo this group, and then re-standardardized including just the 13 participants who had similar sets of cards, and now we have an agreement score of .74 awesome! And if you find a card that is difficult to partner with any others, but that you think is valuable to your study, follow her lead: On a recent sort, I deliberately included three cards I didnt really needso participants would have some cards that were easy to group[to give] participants the confidence to proceed to more difficult groupings.. Learn how users prioritize and rank information within existing categories, You want to test existing IA and website structures to see if they work as expected, You have some information categorized, but need input for organizing the remainder, The topic youre researching is particularly complicated, as you can provide examples of categorization, Gain a deep, nuanced understanding of the user, rather than a wide breadth of knowledge of a group, Understand the direct thought-processes of users, rather than just the outcomes, Get large amounts of feedback from multiple users, or multiple groups of users, Conduct a card sort within a limited budget, Uncover the most natural responses from users, and you dont mind interpreting that data yourself (rather than speaking directly with participants), Looking to gain insight from a wide variety of participants, e.g. Ask users to sort the items into categories. These sessions can be quicker and easier to organize as they dont require facilitators, and you can use online card sorting tools such as Maze to conduct remote card tests and collect insights. In closed card sorting, the researchers create labels for categories and ask participants to . Analyze qualitative information based on user comments. Steps. There are many use cases for card sorting as a research method. You do not get information on why participants sort the cards the way they do, because you cannot see the participants or hear them thinking out loud. Recruit 15-30 representative users to participate in the exercise. The last option is a combination of the two. Giving each image a descriptive label will make your analysis easier. In all cases, youll want to find at least 15 participants. Your unmoderated card sorts run in the background, while you focus on other work. That's where card sorting comes in. In this matrix, we can see that the clustered groups contain cards with very high agreements between participants, which gives a good indication that the groupings are a good place for us to start when coming up with our initial draft IA. Once complete, ask them to give a name/label to each group. And if not, perhaps we should get rid of it entirely. Its called a Participant-centric analysis because every participant response is treated as a potential solution and ranked for similarity with other entire responses. Choosing the right type of card sorting comes down to the objective of your project. The Results Matrix shows you the number of times each card was sorted into your pre-set categories. Anchored in advice from UX design and research experts, stick with this guide to go from novice to pro in your card sorting skills. Cast your eye over the results from each session and let it all sink in. A good experience for your users almost always results in a great result for your organisation. In this card sorting study example we decided to go with 3 questions, all of them pre-study. Prepare a short instruction and a Welcome Message to show before the study, explaining the process and the goals of the sort. Let the participant work. In particular, open card sorts are commonly used to: Closed card sorting is an evaluative research methodits used to assess and validate potential ideas or solutions. Similarly, the card What its like to drink only water for 20 days appeared 16 times under Living on the edge (presumably by people who couldnt fathom that long without coffee or alcohol) and 14 times under Living the good life (presumably by those who felt otherwise). If you're unsure how to organize your website or app information, an open card sort can help. Your goal is to discover how people think about and make sense of your information, not whether or not they can find it quickly on a homepage. Combining the best of Open and Closed Card Sorting, it allows you to validate information grouping strategy while still leaving respondents room for free expression. So we can be confident that most participants who created this group think these cards belong here. Card sorting does not account for tasks at hand and wider contextfor example, we may group tomatoes under fruits, however if the context was within a supermarket, they may be categorized under the vegetable aisle. And youll find a bunch of useful and inspirational information on our blog. find out if people agree on where your information is best placed within existing categories, pinpoint unclear or misleading category labels based on mixed results and fix them, reduce the number of categories you have based on which categories are ignored the most, want to generate ideas for grouping your information and want to give people a category pattern to take inspiration from, see high agreement on some categories after an open card sort, but need clarity on some less certain groupings, are happy with the groupings and labels you have, but want people to have the option to suggest their own just in case, want to find out if participants come up with category labels that are better than the ones you have. Though it is distinct enough from open and closed card sorting to warrant its own approach, a hybrid card sort will be more open or more closed, depending on the number and type of categories you create. They differ as follows: You may also choose to try a combination of the two. Information architecture (IA) is how you organize, structure, and label your content so that users can easily navigate your product and find the information they need. Participants think aloud while sorting, giving a clearer picture of their reactions and thought processes. The Participants table displays useful information about every participant who started your card sort, and can be used to filter your data. Put methods into practice using our tools, Explore articles, news and product updates, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, Sign up for a free account and create a card sort, View a sample card sort from a participants perspective, View sample results from a researchers perspective, Read more about card sorting in our Help Center, One critical after Eastern motorway crash, design a new website or section of a website, or improve an existing website, find out how your customers expect to see your information grouped on your website, discover and compare how people understand different concepts or ideas. Card sorting participants should be able to see all of the items at once. This means there might not be a card to sort for every page on the site. Once you standardize a category, check the agreement score to get an objective assessment of how similar the groupings are. As with all research methods, there are both advantages and disadvantages to card sorting. Rapidly test & validate prototypes, concepts, copy, and more, Work seamlessly with design platforms like Figma, Adobe XD, and more, Get actionable user insights with automated metrics and reports, Send targeted product research campaigns, faster. If possible, randomize the order of presentation so that each piece of content has a chance to be sorted earlier in the session. External links may not function and information on the site may be out of date. Inconsistent: The nature of card sorting means that your results may vary quite widely from one participant to the next. Closed card sorting is a great option if you need to add lots of new content to a site or make sense of a site that has been added to over time and needs reorganising. (screener), What do you read Super Mom Magazine for? In herbook on card sorting, Donna helpfully distinguishes between exploratory analysis (when you look through your data to get impressions, pull ideas out, and be intuitive and creative in your approach) and statistical analysis (when its all about the numbers). Put cards aside to indicate topics the participant would not want on the site. Great choice when you want to understand how users group your content. When possible, try to illustrate your cards with images, to make the sort easier for the respondents. Youll also see the number of unique categories for each card, with fewer categorizations meaning higher agreement among participants. Her colleague was unable to create coherent groups because the cards were inconsistent and often unrelated, and therefore the card sort couldnt provide much insight into how the content could be grouped on the site. For example, if you run an open card sort with 40 cards containing grocery items, you might find that some people group the items by type (vegetables, fruit, dairy) and some by meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner). When working on information architecture, its important to match your users mental models, aka, the way they structure the content in their minds. For card sorting participants, we recommend: You can recruit participants in a bunch of different ways, and how you do so will depend on a few different factors. One on Ones are in-person sessions with an observer. The number and type of categories you set for a hybrid card sort will determine whether the card sort is more open or more closed. add any card sorts from your moderated (in-person) participants who used OptimalSorts printed cards. In particular, you know you need open card sorting if you want to: To help us with our initial draft designs, we ran an open card sort to find out how our readers would group our articles, and which labels they would use to describe the topics. Got fewer than 30 participants? Once you have all your ideas in hand, youll reduce and refine the possibilities until youre left with only the most relevant cards. Tests are easy to arrange and provide fast, reliable results. Ask the participant to name each category. Plan about one hour for each session, longer if you have many cards. The three card sorting techniques you can choose from open, closed, and hybrid will each tell you something different about how people understand and group your information. Card sorting is a technique in user experience design in which a person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a dendrogram (category tree) or folksonomy.It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.. Card sorting uses a relatively low-tech approach. To help organize the "Admissions" section of Rollins.edu, I ran a card sorting exercise with colleagues in the Office of Admissions. Step 5. This image shows a participant partway through the open card sort (so far with six categories, four labelled): As well as our case study, here are a few ideas to get you thinking about how open card sorting could be useful for you: Create a card sort with your current website topics to find out if your website structure matches up with how people would organize the same information, or get ideas for structuring a brand new one: Create a card sort with your blog tags to find out how your readers would expect to see your blog content categorized, and how they conceptualize what you publish. Card sorting takes the guesswork out of it. For Closed and Hybrid card sorting youll also need to prepare category labels. Each card represents a content item from your website. You can learn more about each of them in this list of best online Card Sorting tools. Its particularly useful if: Moderated card sorting involves a moderator who will debrief the participants and ask them follow-up questions following the card sort. . Fake ancestry dna results . participant commentary during a moderated session, or they could be quantitative, e.g. This technique is used when a team wants to group and label website information in a way that makes sense for the target audience. If you will be conducting a card sort using physical cards, write each topic on a separate index card. As the first step in our Alignment Model, our Values Cards provide an interactive way to define what you value most and set the stage for . Card sorting provides you with a glimpse into the perspective of your user. The human mind is so fond of pattern-finding that we use it regularly as a shortcut when making decisions, especially on intellectually-taxing tasks. Provide the participants with an estimate of how long the card sort will take before beginning the session to help them better gauge the required time and effort. Create your own random idea generator Try an interactive writing exercise. Can be used for gathering any type of additional feedback. When you set fewer categories, participants are more likely to create their own, and thus it will tend towards open. Video Transcript; Downloads; Workspaces; Check the Downloads tab for some printable cards you can use for this card sorting exercies. The purpose of the Card Sorting exercise is to get the end users to organize the website content into hierarchies and information architecture they feel is intuitive. Creating a User-Centered Approach in Government. pinpoint the cards with the fewest unique categorizations and thus the clearest matches with their categories, find out which cards were placed in every category, and could thus be ambiguous. 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. By presenting participants with different elements of the product and allowing them to group items into what feels natural, youre able to get a deep level of insight into how potential users approach navigating your product and expect information to be structured. You can also use the Card Sort exercise to start a deeper conversation about what he or she values and why. For closed card sorts, you need to create enough categories that people can find a home for most of your cards, but not too many that only include categories that match your intentions for your website or your research questions. When deciding between digital or paper/in-person card sorting, it often simply comes down to resource availability and location. If no, make sure to go through these pages: Learn about the process in this Card Sorting Guide, compare the Pricing, get familiar with Information Architecture and Optimalsort and discover card sorting Tips & Tricks. Most of the online card sorting tools have these instructions by default, but you can usually customize them as well. Throughout this guide, well explore the benefits of different kinds of card sorting, how to run a successful card sort, and which tools to use. To prepare for the session, collate a list of 30-60 topics and write them on post-it notes or cards. You need to balance the need to keep the time commitment to around 10 to 15 minutes with the need to provide sufficient context (enough similar cards) for groups to form. The pricing varies accordingly. Card Sorting will help you create a robust information architecture for your website. For a more detailed analysis, consider using an Excel spreadsheet to show the relationship between the cards or use one of the available software programs to analyze your data. Card sorting is a well-established research technique for discovering how people understand and categorize information. Card sorting has many benefits within UX research and design, namely due to its ability to comprehensively understand a users way of thinking. This image shows a participant partway through our closed card sort with our eight pre-defined categories: As well as our case study, here are a few ideas to get you thinking about how closed card sorting could be useful for you: Create cards with topics from your homepage or your search filters, and create categories like Use often and Use never to find out what people need to access the most when they arrive on your site: Create cards with company values adjectives and set categories like Our company is and Our company is not to find out how your customers and clients perceive you, and compare it with the data you gather from staff and colleagues. It is tempting to want the participant to sort "ALL" of your content, but be mindful of participant fatigue. Exploratory analysis is an approach where you go through the results searching for ideas using your intuition and creativity. Card sorting is an excellent way to understand how your users expect the information architecture of a website or product to be structured. The category Global news update had the highest number of unique cards: 35 cards out of 45 were placed there at least once, suggesting that the label itself was too broad, and thus too ambiguous for our website. The grid simply shows you how the number of times a particular card appears in a standardized category. If I was to conduct this experiment I would leave it this way because I want to receive information on what individuals believe should be the architecture of the pages . In open card sorting, each participant is given a stack of cards that are pre-filled out with topics and then asked to group those cards any way they want. groupings within groupings). Youll also find out how many unique cards were sorted into each category, with fewer unique cards meaning higher agreement among participants. We wanted to generate ideas for grouping our articles, and we chose a hybrid card sort instead of an open card sort because: In this image, you can see the four categories we gave people, and that a participant is about to create their first one. At worst, a card sorting exercise will confirm youre on the right track, and at best, it will take you off the wrong one and send you in a better direction. As a suggestion, limit yourself to 50-60 topics or less. You could conduct an open card sort first to identify content categories and then use a closed card sort to see how well the category labels work. With existing websites, you can always use Google Analytics to find out which pages are the most popular and use these as a starting point. However, we dont want to leave this category standardized because the agreement score suggests the categories arent similar enough. You can follow all my posts by subscribing to my RSS feed or signing up to my email newsletter above. The strength of an open card sort is in generating ideas and finding consensus amongst large numbers of people. Due to the availability of developed online tools, digital card sorting can work well for open or closed card sorts, as well as moderated or unmoderated. Can be used for gathering any type of additional feedback. Next, choose the type of card sorting that suits you best. OptimalSort offers monthly plans or one-off fees if you just need to use it for a single project. Its reasonably inexpensive and can be carried out in person or remotely. She recommends reviewing your card sort with this in mind to make sure each itemcould have a potential partner (or many partners). Prepare the cards according to the software instructions. Besides the first option hopefully being useful to you, youmightget useful ideas for footer and sidebar facets from options two and three. When you ask people to complete a card sort, youre asking them to look for and create patterns with your cards. To conduct a card sort, you can use actual cards, pieces of paper, or one of several online card-sorting software tools. As we already know from this card sorting guide, there is offline and online card sorting. This website was created with a simple purpose. So there you have it: card sorting in a nutshell! As a suggestion, limit yourself to 50-60 topics or less. It works best when you have a lot of results. How to run a card sorting exercise is done in 7 steps: Write Down Topics. Limit the number of cards. You have two dendrograms to explore, which youll find more or less useful depending on the number of completed card sorts you have: The connected blue lines show clusters that represent the percentage of participants who agree with the highlighted cards being grouped together. The Results Overview tells you big picture information about your card sort. The main advantage of in-person card sorts is that it allows for more complex groups (e.g. When deciding the format of your card sorting study, determining between moderated or unmoderated is an important step. This helps give you qualitative insights to understand the rationale behind the grouping. Group - Concurrent In-person Sessions have participants sort a set of cards as a group. What new categories did people create, and are they better than yours? We created and analyzed three card sorts an open, a closed, and a hybrid that each included 48 cards labelled with headlines representing the kinds of content we plan to publish. Values may be considered as "guiding lights" or aspirational principles that are core to . Understanding your users mental models can then in turn inform a variety of decisions, including how to: By using card sorting, you get to understand the users mental model or test if your existing mental model works as expected. The results from an open card sorting test are helpful in understanding how a target audience structures information, identifies potential bottlenecks, and can help to better label categories and sub-categories. However due to the nature of involving a facilitator, most commonly theyre conducted in person. You can add your organisations' logo and ask additional questions before and after the exercise if you wish. STEP 7: Close card sort & analyze results. This method is generally easier because it requires less resources, and the tool will do the heavy lifting of analyzing the results and revealing which items were most commonly grouped. The obvious advantages of remote card sorting are that it saves time and allows you to reach a wider audience. How long does a card sorting session take? When improving a live website, the hybrid method might be most suitable. Likewise, if you note that some of your cards are being regularly left out or set aside, try to determine whether its because the card labels are unclear or the content itself didnt seem to fit in with other categories. First, you can conduct a hybrid card sorting exercise to see how participants label and sort your websites structure. Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site. Throughout this 101, well illustrate how card sorting works with a project we created for this purpose. Determining the right approach to your card sort is a key part of ensuring you get the results youre looking for. When we opened our study, we quickly saw that groups that had the word Animals in the label were rather popular (with 15 all together): Its tempting to throw categories with the same or similar labels together straight away, but before you do, cast your eye over both the labels and the cards in each category to ensure the participants are all thinking in the same way. Check the example of a PDF report as well. In-person card sorting sessions can be conducted with individuals or in groups. how many participants sorted the same cards into each category, the cards with the highest agreement on where they belong, and the cards with the lowest, which categories meant different things to different people (ie. Consider the cognitive load on the participant. Card sorting tests concepts, not usability so the cards themselves dont need to be written in the most usable format, or exactly as they are on your website. It is often most useful once you have done some homework to find out about your users and understand your content. I help savvy marketers, product owners and UX advocates make the case that a useable, accessible and people-first experience is the best path to business success. What cards are never put together, and are thus considered conceptually different by all participants? get people to rank or arrange items based on set criteria. 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. Ensure information is organized in a way that makes sense to your audience. Card sorting enables you to discover how people understand information, how they feel about different ideas, and helps designers structure the information of a site or product. Dont forget to tell your testers how appreciated their help is! Card sorting is a UX research method that helps you discover how people understand and categorize information. In a closed card sort, asking about word expectations, their final card organization, and other follow up questions can provide valuable insight and observations for your research. Hope youve already studied all the basics of card sorting UX research technique, its specifics and advantages and are ready to look at the card sorting example. There are two suggested ways to look at the results of your research. Check out our card sorting Tips & Tricks page for more info on the topic! The more categories you create, the more options participants will have, and the more likely itll be that you find out which categories are preferred over others. Card sorting works by presenting participants with a set of pre-made cards and asking them to prioritize or organize them into groups. Look for repeating, common patterns, note similarities and differences between each session. GB208980095 Your Privacy Advertise on this site, free ebook on building a user-centric culture, support for freelancers and agency owners, User Research: 10 Techniques to Get Started or Improve, How to Build a User-Centric Information Architecture Without Endless Debate, How to Get Started With Usability Testing, Why performance is the best way to improve the user experience. 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. Hybrid card sorting is a great format if youre looking to validate existing ideas and information, without closing off the potential for new ideas. Minimize interruptions but encourage the participant to think aloud. When we place every category that uses the same words or phrases into a standardized category, we can assess the effectiveness of the category by looking at the agreement score. The Results Matrix tells you pretty quickly which cards had the highest and lowest agreement between participants on where the cards were best placed. Mattel, creators of the Barbie doll, wanted to review the IA of the Doll Showcase section of their Barbie collectors' website. Depending on your niche and the goal of your study you might wanna be sorting content titles, specific products, items from the menu etc. You can run an open, a closed, or a hybrid card sort, depending on what you want to find out. One of the main benefits of card sorting is that it allows you to make informed decisions based on users' expectations and mental models rather than based on assumptions. The popular placements matrix shows the percentage participants who sorted each card into the corresponding category, and attempts to propose the most popular groups based on each individual cardshighestplacement score. have products your customers will expect to see as images, like clothes, appliances, and furniture, design portfolio or photography websites and want ideas for grouping images. Instead, it's usually used to test if existing category labels are clear. Common goals when carrying out a card sorting study include: learning what users think about an existing IA, understanding why users group ideas in certain ways, and discovering how users categorize information. It's time to look at the results. Visit digital.gov for current information. . You should use the results of your card sort to help you define the navigation of your site. its when you give respondents categories to sort the cards into. For card sorting, however, there's only a 0.75 correlation between the results from 5 users and the ultimate results. The best products are created with their users needs and pain-points in mind. Create cards with the different versions of a design youre working on, and ask people to sort them into categories like My favorite design and My least favorite design. It appears to my inner neat-freak and hints at an outcome that will be both practical and useful, which is exactly what you need if youre about to start organising (or reorganizing) the content on your website. I recommend this one, in case you want to find out how users match cards with existing content structure. Join Our Slack Community. Closed card sorts with easy grouping options (yes/no/maybe decisions) tend to require less depth of thought and more automatic responses, and so going well beyond 60 cards can work really well. When you set much fewer categories than people need to sort all the cards, your hybrid card sort will lean towards open. A closed card sort can be useful where labels are already set and you want to know how your users would place content within an already existing sitemap. Provide the best participant experience even when you're not there. quickly see which cards are very rarely paired together so you dont need to waste time thinking they might. Both options are pretty great, but for bigger insights I would recommend going with the first option. Though theres no hard limits on how few or how many cards to include, we recommend aiming for between 30 and 60 cards for all card sorts because: More specifically: for an open card sort, 30 to 50 cards will usually account for the complexity of the task and the depth of thought you want from people. Since one of the goals of card sorting is to get inside the minds of the people you design for, take time to establish, recruit, and manage participants that will give you the most true-to-life data. In a card sorting session, participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and they may also help you label these groups. Its a user research technique that allows you to discover how users expect to find your content presented. Card sorting is a UX research technique for discovering how people understand and categorize information. Decide if You're Going to do a Digital or Written Test. You can also make use of high-quality recruitment panels, which can be effective if you want fast, pain-free options with minimal effort. For an open sort, if possible consider requiring them to sort the cards, but perhaps not to label them, since that might be the more challenging part of the task, providing you have limited your items as suggested. Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site. You can unsubscribe in one click, and I will never share your email address. (Thanks to UX Designer and ResearcherAshlea McKayfor this compelling example). First, I ask users and stakeholders to group the content into categories, and then I get the participants to name or create their own categories. Apart from that, there arent many advantages versus using a digital tool; the data will look similar and you are able to ask the same questions.. When youre creating a closed or hybrid card sort, take care to craft categories that help you achieve your objectives. Our aim for this guide is to give you straightforward, practical advice for running effective online card sorts. This means people will be less likely to use your categories and more likely to create new categories to complete the card sort. Open card sort:Participants sort cards into categories that make sense to them, and label each category themselves, Closed card sort:Participants sort cards into categories you give them, Hybrid card sort:Participants sort cards into categories you give them, and can create their own categories as well. The main benefits of card sorting are that it enables researchers and designers to: most common ways researchers and designers use the insights from a card sort, Create the information architecture (IA) of a website or homepage that is easy to navigate, Learn how people understand different concepts or ideas, and how they feel about them, Understand where users expect certain content to be found, Get inspiration for labeling and grouping content or ideas, , UX Researcher and Designer at Electrolux, Moderated vs. unmoderated card sorting: A researcher can conduct and oversee the session (moderated), or users work through the session on their own (unmoderated), Paper vs. digital card sorting: You can either write the topics on physical index cards (paper) or type them onto cards in a simulated environment (digital), Create new information architectures or improving existing ones, Find patterns in how users expect to find content, Generate ideas for how to structure and label your website or app information architecture, Find out if users understand your categorizations, Pinpoint misleading categories and make informed decisions on how to improve. An agreement score of .8 means that 80% of participants in the new category agree with the grouping. Consider using a different colored card for having participants name the groups. Here are some categories we chose for this card sorting example: Questionnaires before and after your study are important for gathering all types of info about the users. Decide whether you will be doing a physical card sort or using online card-sorting software. Combining the best of Open and Closed Card Sorting, it allows you to validate information grouping strategy while still leaving respondents room for free expression. Heres what we got in our card sorting example study: A study overview with the respondents information: And other countless graphs and charts thatll help you organize your website in a user-friendly way! It's better to have at least 30 cards before starting a card sorting session. Often, the way information is organized in a product subconsciously ends up reflecting the internal organization of the Product team. The disadvantage is that you cant question your participants motives, or ask questions while they carry out the task. Card sorting can allow you to start understanding these early on, before too much time has been invested in ideas that dont align with your users. The Best Merge Method (BMM) tells you X% of participants agree with parts of this grouping, and so enables you to extract as much as you can from the data. As you begin analyzing the results, look for both general insights and specific ideas for how to craft the top two levels of the new intranet's navigation. To conduct a card sort, you can use actual cards, pieces of paper, or one of several online . It provides really good insights into how your users think and delivers evidence that can help prevent the internal clashes that can arise when information architecture is decided on by internal stakeholders. Watch for anomalies and surprises. As such, the quantitative numbers you need for techniques like tree testing and first-click testing may not be your objective.Instead, youll want enough completed card sorts to get ideas and see consensus forming, and not too many that youre overwhelmed with the data. Teacher's Notes; Questions? This helps you when you begin to analyze the cards. Use self-adhesive labels and a word processor. What is card sorting. Card sorting is such a valuable research tool, because it allows you to better understand peoples mental models and inform your information architecture, taking into account how the people who will use your product actually think. Three types of card sorting. Then, you canupload the card sortsfor each participant in the Participants tab of your OptimalSort results. I use hybrid card sorting to map all the content of the website. quickly pinpoint the cards that were placed in all categories at least once. An ideal number of participants for your study is 30-50. You can learn more about each of them in this list of. For an open sort, if possible consider requiring them to sort the cards, but perhaps not to label them, since that might be the more challenging part of the task, providing you have limited your items as suggested in point 1). When possible, try to illustrate your cards with images, to make the sort easier for the respondents. Creating an IA that's easy to understand and intuitive is key to providing a good user experience. In a closed card sorting session, you present participants with a pre-selected set of categories and ask them to prioritize and sort cards as it makes sense to them, within those defined categories. Group / Independent - Concurrent In-person Sessions have participants sort a set of cards independently. Photograph or write down the names the participant gave to each grouping and the numbers of the cards the participant included under that name. Participants can card sort using physical . Every card sort you run with OptimalSort will present you with a Results Overview and Participant data. (multiple choice), provide that option for a quite reasonable price), Asking people to join your study on social media, Recruiting directly from the website (with the help of the Recruitment widget). You'll have the list of topics in the computer for later analysis. You must have as many sets of cards as concurrent sessions or have each participant at a separate computer if using online card-sorting software. In this card sorting type, participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and then create their own names for these categories. The main advantage of paper card sorting is that there is no learning curve from technology. Unmoderated card sorting is the format to go with if youre looking to: In digital card sorting, you use online card sorting tools and card sorting software to simulate the card sorting drag-and-drop activity of dividing cards into groups. As with many remote testing tools, you cant control the environment that the task is carried out in, so you cant be sure that you have your users full attention. Their results will be included with the unmoderated participants, and youll have the extra insight from observing and listening to your participants. It's a technique that works by way of determining the domain knowledge of your . Related Discussions. The above guide is for an open card sort, but can easily be adapted for a closed card sort; just make sure you prepare your content categories beforehand. In this example of card sorting we shared a link to our study via email newsletter and used the Recruitment widget on the website, offering a discount code for every finished sort. When you run closed and hybrid card sorts, the categories you set will lead people to think about your cards in a particular way, whether its on purpose or not. Keep in mind that there are several variations, as described above. You can leave the card sort open from two days to one week. Thank the participant for his or her time and provide instructions for receiving payment or other gift (if promised). This means people will be more likely to sort the cards into your categories only, and less likely to create new categories. Provide instructions for the sort (whether open or closed) and let them know approximately how long the session should take to complete. Ask what words the participant would expect to see on the homepage or second-level page that would lead the participant to that particular group of content items. The resulting data can then . That is a great practice for motivating people to attend your research. Thats why its important that you have enough categories covering all the possible groups. For example, card sorting can be used to group relevant programs or services into categories or other similar contexts. The obvious advantages of remote card sorting are that it saves time and allows you to reach a wider audience. However, you can also subscribe to Digital Insights (audio versions of all my posts) or One Footer in the Grave, a talk show from aging web designers! Card sorting is a research methodology that can help you discover how people understand and categorize information. You need to choose the perfect online card sorting tool for your study. Heres a great example of a Card Sort for an e-commerce website: Check Out Our Card Sorting Tools Pricing Comparison! statistics on time to complete the test, number of cards sorted, or percentage of cards in one group. The software will analyze participant data in a variety of ways. Youll also find it useful to check out our sample cards sorting (from both the participants and the researchers perspective). A glance tells us this immediately, before weve even looked at the detail: When we look more closely, we can find out which cards are paired together the most often: And which cards are rarely paired together rarely, if at all: With agreement levels like this, one option for us is to draft a set of categories based on the darkest blue clusters along the right (which include around 60% of our cards). I am a User Experience Consultant,Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialist and expert indigital transformation. Or use OptimalSort in a moderated setting in person or online, the choice is yours. Whether its a selection of potential features or different naming conventions, card sorting is the ideal method to gain feedback from users based on their first impressions and instincts. And for information architecture, you might want to see how a user might sort navigational . Create cards with your product features or services and set categories like Yes, I want this! and I could give this a miss to find out what your customers want and dont want. Vaida explains: "Once the initial structure is set . Running an open card sort with OptimalSort is a generative exercise: the results give you lots of ideas of how you could label and organize your website content. More on what type to choose in this Card Sorting Guide. After 15 users, diminishing returns set in and correlations increase very little: testing 30 people gives . Card sorting will help you understand your users' expectations and understanding of your topics. Guillermo suggests that: Closed card sorting is ideal for testing existing information architecture, as youll only get the information you specifically need, so its really efficient.. The other option is digital-card sorting, which requires the user to perform the card sort on a website or service. Last but not least, card sorting is a simple and cost-effective method of gaining insights about your users and how they think. Youll find plenty of useful advice for in-person (moderated) card sorts as well, and learn how to add this data to your online card sorts for analysis. Ultimately, identifying the card sorting type thats best for you comes down to the type of project youre conducting, your user research goals, and available resources. We used closed card sorting to find out if people understood our category labels and agreed on which articles belonged where. Participants can group a set of cards into predefined categories, but they can also create new categories. Of the 15 groups with the word Animal in the label, 13 had a similar set of cards, but two participants had labelled their categories slightly differently (Animals and Environment and Animals and Nature) and had thus included extra cards the others didnt have (Glaciers melting faster than previously thought, for example). Moderated card sorting often happens in the form of a one-to-one study, which allows the moderator to directly ask follow-up questions, or even ask the participant to express their thought process aloud while sorting. Analyze quantitative information based on: How often cards appeared in specific categories. Here is how to conduct a card sorting exercise: Place website items or topics on cards. Similarly, you could invite people via your social media channels or add banners to your website. Card Sorting. Digital card sorting works especially well if you are: Run digital card sorting sessions and discover how users understand and categorize information. Open card sort: Participants sort cards into categories that make . It gives you the opportunity to revise and adapt your card sort, and you can always send it to more people if necessary. Hybrid Card Sort respondents sort your cards into defined categories or create their own. The cards need to be on the same conceptual level and similar enough for participants to actually be able to sort them into groups. In this post, we explore how to do a card sorting exercise and why it is so worthwhile. But for specific and invaluable advice on getting moderated card sorts right, check out Donna Spencers bookCard Sorting: Designing Usable Categories(actually, youll see her wisdom on card sorting in general throughout). The two strongest clusters towards the top and centre are cards placed in our two categories The natural world and Food and lifestyle: The PCA aims to find the most popular grouping strategy, and then to find two more popular alternatives among those who disagreed with the first strategy. get quick answers on ranked items if people sorted the cards according to your ranking criteria. So when youre deciding what cards to include, look underneath the language for the concept they represent. It might be tempting to have a card for every topic on your site, but in this case, more might not be better. This section is supported by insights from Guillermo Gineste, Senior Product Designer at Maze. In this example of card sorting we shared a link to our study via email newsletter and used the Recruitment widget on the website, offering a discount code for every finished sort. Be careful not to lead or influence their process. Whether you prefer to work with physical index cards or online card sorting software, with a moderator or not, every card sort will answer a different set of questions and provide new understanding of your users, so you can lay a better foundation for a user-centered design. 2022 Optimal Workshop Ltd. All rights reserved. Planning your card sorting exercise. The person conducting the test (usability analyst, user . If you include enough cards with the same opening phrases, casings, and sentence structures, its likely that most people will group them together but instead of them approaching it conceptively, theyve quickly and without realizing it played a simple game of Snap. If you see a sort with a 11/43 agreement score, its telling you that 10 other participants sorted their cards into groupssimilar tothese ones. The facilitator may brief the participants at the beginning and debrief the participants at the end, but the participant works alone for most of the session. You can really think outside the box with this technique use it to find outa bunch of interesting things. First up, have a good look. Beside the agreement score, you can see the number of participants included in that score. Plain Language in Practice: Writing for the Web, Write Plainly: An Update on Plain Writing Principles and the New Law, Plain Language: The Act, What It Means, What You Need to Do. Nikolas Sgaraglio HCI 510 Card Sorting This card sorting exercise was done to test the information architecture for the SUNY Oswego website. If youre conducting an open card sort, ask your participants to group the content first. A great place for your screener. Powered by WordPress | Theme Aronia by Codeless. Feel free to check it out! To conduct a card sort, you can use actual cards, pieces of paper, or an online card sorting tool. As with other techniques, arrange for payment or other incentives to thank the participant for spending the time and effort helping you. Images can be as effective as text for representing concepts and items, and in some cases more so. This technique is ideal for when you already have certain categories established, but you need input into how the remaining ones should be labeled, or arent positive on what goes where. Email: paul@boagworld.com An open card sort is the equivalent of an open-ended question in a traditional study, in that people can give any answer, and are not confined to one type of response. When it comes to selecting the right type of card sorting, Vaida Pakulyte, UX Researcher and Designer at Electrolux, explains: All card sorting types complement each other. people from multiple countries, Under time constraints and need to conduct the card sort quickly and process results quickly, How many users are participating, if working together, Whether you are collecting quantitative or qualitative data, Whether you are manually analyzing the data or have a tool to process this, Unmoderated card sorting may not provide deep enough insights, Analyzing the results of a card sort (particularly a paper one) can be very time-consuming. Start by adding cards and categories. Generally, the time needed to complete a card sort will depend on several factors: Are there any disadvantages to card sorting? 5. Resize all your images before you upload them if you want them to be the same size, and preview your card sort to make sure it looks how you want it to. This is simply because narrowing down the most effective structure from 40 different suggested categorizations will probably be an easier task than from 200 different suggestions. There are a number of tools at our disposal for remote card sorting, so its worth considering your options before you dive in. An opportunity to target and filter your respondents, Detailed reports and easy-to-analyze visuals. Time-consuming analysis: While the actual card sorting exercise is quick to run, analyzing the data can take more time, in part because of the potential inconsistency in responses. Or This item is an outlierso does it belong on our website at all?. If, at the end, the participant has too many groups for the homepage, ask if some of the groups could be combined. Try card sorting example study for yourself using these handy demos: open card sorting, closed card sorting, and hybrid card sorting. We drafted our own website structure that we felt fit with our brand, with eight categories labelled in informative and creative ways. The darker the blue, the more times a card appears in the corresponding category. Participants sort the cards independently on their own computers. These can be digital or physical cards that the user can move around. The Actual Agreement Method (AAM) dendrogram gives you the data straight: X% of participants agree with this exact grouping. To help you, we created this ultimate list of. On the other hand, don't create too many cards (over 60). Jakob Nielsenpoints out that Its OK to actually reduce the usability of the cards, because people dont actually use them in the UI [user interface]. Practical exercise. Try not to use too professional language if youre not sure the users will understand it. Lets take a look. Also, keep in mind that the more participants you have completing your card sort, the potential for more complexity in your analysis increases as well. First, you can conduct a hybrid card sorting exercise to see how participants label and sort your website's structure. Vaida Pakulyte, UX Researcher and Designer at Electrolux, notes that An open sort exercise is good at the beginning of the project because it helps you to understand how people naturally categorize information.. Jakob Nielsen illustrates the issue these example cards, that are written the way they would be on a website, but that offer too-obvious pairings: To solve this,he recommendsediting your labels using synonyms and non-parallel structures, an approach that doesnt need to involve extensive rewrites: instead of Harvesting strawberries, we could say Picking strawberries; and instead of two cards that begin with planting, you could make their structures different by labelling one Planting corn and another Wheat planting. 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