Card Sorting
An Information Architecture (IA) technique, whereby your target audience labels and groups cards to help organise the struture of your site
We use card sorting to help design or investigate the information architecture of a website we’re working on. In a card sort session, participants organise cards into groups that make sense to them. We also ask them to label these groups.
We conduct card sorts with index cards, pieces of paper, Post-Its or one of several online card-sorting software tools.
Key benefits of running a Card Sort with Channel Dynamics
- Understand your users’ expectations and understanding of your website
- Customers design your information architecture in a way that makes sense to them
- Use these insights to develop the structure for your website
- Help refine the language and key terms you use on your website
- Decide what to put on various pages and how to prioritise that information hierarchically
- Helps you label sections, categories and navigation
- This in-builds findability, effciency and effectiveness into your site architecture
Open and Closed Card Sorts
In an open card sort, participants create their own headings for the grouped cards. This helps you understand how your audience classifies the cards, but also what terms they use to describe the categories. This is useful for your navigation structure.
In contrast, in a closed card sort, participants are provided with a pre-defined set of category names. They then assign the index cards to these fixed categories. This helps reveal the degree to which the participants agree on which cards belong under each category.
Sometimes it’s useful to conduct an open card sort first (to identify content categories) and then use a closed card sort to see how well the category labels work.
Online Testing Software
Many of our card sorts are carried out “live”, in-person but if you have geographically distributed users, online sessions can be useful too.
We’ve tried a few online card sorting applications over the years. If you haven’t already started testing we’ll look at which solution is best for you.
JUST A FEW OF THE RECENT CLIENTS FOR WHOM WE’VE CONDUCTED A CARD SORT
“The process of working with Channel Dynamics has been an invaluable experience. We moved from idea to user tested interactive prototypes in a couple of weeks. The IT team were able to build the final proposition with the confidence that it would be right for users.”Head of Marketing and Retail Channels at First Rate