CHAPTER 3 – Card Sorting

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the use of card sorting, how to prepare for and conduct a card sort, and how to analyze and present the information. Card sorting is a method for classifying or categorizing content, names, icons, objects, ideas, problems, tasks, or other items by putting them into actual or virtual piles that are similar in some way. It is a powerful tool for shaping information architecture in Web sites and software applications. Card sorting is excellent for situations where the developer want the users' mental model to drive the information architecture of the product. A developer can do a card sort for entire sets of information in a Web site's or for subsets of information within a specific Web page. There are several types of information that one can obtain with a card sort such as terminology employed by users, overall organization of the content or tasks in the product, labels users apply to different categories of information or tasks, missing objects, and unnecessary objects.