Card Sorting Explained

Most developers would love to get inside the heads of their typical users to see how their application or website can best be organized.

How can the structure of information on a website or application make the most sense to the typical user?

That’s a compelling information architecture-related question that is best answered by the research technique of card sorting.

Card Sorting Defined

In card sorting, researchers ask participants to use actual cards, pieces of paper, or automated card-sorting software to organize topics into categories that make sense to them.

In the case of website development, the user research technique helps build the structure for an easy to use, intuitive website. The findings might also help decide what to put on the homepage, or how to label categories and navigation.

Card sorting helps identify the most effective content hierarchy. In other words, the findings help designers and developers figure out “what should go where.”

Card Sorting Expertise

Carol Righi, PhD, an associate with TecEd, has led many card sorting exercises for a variety of user research and information design projects.

Under her leadership, card sorting has helped reveal to clients how their target users visualize the structure of a website, what types of content they expect to find there, where they expect to find it, what they expect it to be named, and how they expect to navigate to it.

The results help inform decisions about site organization, navigation, labeling and terminology, the site map, specialized site indexes, home page content, and more.

Additional Insight

Recently, Righi teamed with UX colleagues on an article published in the Journal of Usability Studies entitled “Card Sort Analysis Best Practices.”

The article provides a set of guidelines for approaching this sometimes complex but much-needed technique in the arsenal of the UX professional.

As Righi notes, with card sorting, the “devil is in the details.”

She and her co-authors present a set of proven best practices for analyzing card sort data.  In this way, developers and designers can use the findings to effectively organize, structure, and label the content of a website or application into a structure that enables efficient navigation.

Learn More Enhancing Usability

Looking to enhance the usability of your website or application by creating an information architecture that reflects how users view the content?

Contact TecEd for more information about card sorting and other useful techniques.