Card Sorting

Card Sorting asks users to sort index cards based on what make sense to them and even no their terminology. It is specially used to help determine optimal website layouts, navigation structure.

01 Definition

When user comprehension and meaningful categorization is critical, card sorting can help clarify.

---- Universal Methods of Design p.26

Card sorting is a simple technique in user experience design where a group of subject experts or "users", however inexperienced with design, are guided to generate a category tree or folksonomy. It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.

---- Wikipedia

02 Natures

Notes

It helps to shape research findings into a series of fact-based narratives that connect the people for whom we are designing to promising design concepts.
observation - What did you see, read or hear
judgement - What’s your opinion about that observation
value - What values are ultimately at work
concept/sketch - What can the design team do to solve this problem
key metaphor “What is the hook for this story”

Suited Context

It suits the situation when teams have large scale data to analysis and want to be inspired by insights from these data, elito will helps them focused on detailed data, and collaborate group members working on the same page.

03 Procedures

Select a moderator who is familiar with the content and participants who are the target audience of the content, and who care about the information.
Work iteratively with individual participants (no more than 3-5 people).
Limit the total number of participants. After 15 sessions, there are diminishing retuns on the insight that can be garnered from card sorts.
Use 30-100 cards, and allow about 30 minutes for each multiple of 50 cards.
Include blank cards and marker to allow participants to add their own items where needed.
If there are no consistent patterns emerging after ten card sorts, consider renaming the cards, or reconsider the categories.

04 Reflection

Strengths

It was easy to work in separate locations, but collaborate results later
Coming back to the excel doc lead to new ideas
The final process of cutting up the lines of logic helped formulate new ideas and make connections
We had to work quickly and couldn’t dwell on making anything too perfect, leading to a low stress environment

Limitation

The analysis process was time consuming.
Focus on detailed facts, while lost the big picture. Some concepts comes from our judgement, which might have bias.
We didn’t really use our Key Metaphor column in the end.

06 Supplement Reading

Gengsu Tu |

Interaction Design Methods Notebook by Gengsu
Feburary - May, 2014
Timeframe: 4 months