Organize your content with card sorting: a user research technique to understand how users group and label information.

Getting Started

If you are involved in website or app development, it is important to understand how your users think and what they expect from your product.

Card sorting is a user research method that can help you better understand how your users categorize information and prioritize content.

This guide is for anyone who wants to improve their website or app’s navigation and user experience.

How To

1. Define the scope: Determine the purpose of your card sorting exercise, what information you want to gather, and who your target users are.
2. Create your cards: Write down all the items you want to test on separate cards. These can be pages, sections, or individual pieces of content.
3. Recruit participants: Find people who match your target user profile and ask them to sort the cards into groups that make sense to them.
4. Collect data: Record the results of each participant’s sorting, either by taking notes or using a digital tool.
5. Analyze the data: Look for patterns and commonalities in the groupings that participants created. Use this information to inform your website or app’s navigation and content organization.

Best Practices

• Keep it simple: Use clear and concise language on your cards to avoid confusion.
• Test with real users: The results will be more accurate if you use real users who match your target demographic.
• Use a mix of open and closed sorting: Open sorting allows participants to create their own categories, while closed sorting provides pre-defined categories to choose from.
• Test early and often: Card sorting can be done at any stage of development, but it is best to start early and test frequently to avoid costly changes later on.

Examples

Let’s say you are working on a news website and want to improve the navigation.

You could create cards for each section of the website (e.g.

Sports, Politics, Entertainment) as well as individual articles.

You recruit a group of users who match your target demographic and ask them to sort the cards into groups that make sense to them.

After analyzing the data, you notice that most participants created a category for “Local News” and grouped articles by location rather than topic.

This insight could inform your website’s navigation and content organization to better cater to your users’ preferences.