7.4: Card Sorting

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a fascinating approach that you can use with minimal technology to figure out how your participants use terms and group them together. The approach can also be a powerful tool for sorting in situations where you need to think collectively, but we’ll primarily focus this discussion on using card sorting as a testing method. Card sorting is fairly literal in its meaning—you use notecards or something equivalent while asking users to sort those cards into various stacks that go together. The goal is to figure out how folks sort, and you may even go further to ask them why.

Card sorting can be guided or unguided, meaning that you can create your own categories to allow folks to put content into, or you can give them a stack of cards and ask them to create their own categories for the content/terms that each card represents. Each approach as value and gives you a different insight into what is going on with your terms/categories.

Structure

Usually a card sort is structured around a stack of terms. The source of the terms can vary, depending on what you’re hoping to find out. For example, if you have a menu system for a website and you want to know how folks would categorize your pages, you can use a card sort to figure out how they’d lump content together in their own categories. You can also use card sorting to figure out if your existing system makes sense, having folks place each item in your menu system into the top-level menu headings, testing to see if they follow your logic or another logic.

A card sort can be entirely focused around sorting, or you can include a component of explanation. You may simply want folks to organize cards, but you can also include the ability to name stacks when this is happening in an unguided sort, giving folks the ability to create their own categories rather than just stacking content in the same pile. In addition, you can ask folks to explain the choices that they’ve made once the sort is over, which may give you additional insight into the logic they used to make their choices.

Face-to-face card sorts are the norm, but you can also use electronic services to carry out a card sort. There are any number of services online that will allow you to create card sorts, and you can create your own ad hoc sort using a database program like Excel or the equivalent. In that type of scenario you would simply list your terms and ask folks to put them into columns using copy/paste.

In any scenario, it is incredibly valuable to get the actual feedback from the user after they’ve done the sort, so whenever possible try to get your users to explain after they’re done why they’ve sorted the way they did. It may be best to ask them this after rather than during—you don’t want to push them to overthink their work.

Interpretation

The interpretation of a card sort closely follows the way you’ve set it up what you hope to learn. If you’re giving folks a set of subjects and asking them to place them in an existing set of chapter headings, you’ll likely want to try and see what is different between the logic the user makes use of and your own logic. This can be helpful when you’re trying to build a table of contents for a manual or other document that will be useful for reference. In scenarios where you’re attempting to make groupings, you’ll want to see how folks place the content, and you’ll want to pay special attention to content that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere at all. This can be a sign that your content is misnamed or doesn’t belong in the existing framework; it might also mean that your users simply don’t find much value in that content or really understand what it means or why it is there.

Again, you’ll want to think through your card sorting as a way to find out how folks view categories and terms. This can identify terms that are misunderstood, terms that folks see as belonging together, and generally help you get a better handle on the taxonomy of a given project. Design a sort around something you want to learn; you’ll find you get better results with a goal than simply performing a card sort to perform a card sort.