Card Sorting

Imagine searching in a library where books are randomly placed, or in a store where items have no logical order. Frustrating, right? The same goes for digital products. How we organize and label information, known as information architecture, affects how easily users find what they need. Sometimes, internal structures or technical views shape the arrangement of digital content. This can clash with how users actually think about that information. That’s where Card Sorting comes in. Card sorting is a key UX research method. It shows how users think. This helps build information structures and navigation systems that fit how they naturally organize ideas. This article will explain Card Sorting, its types and process, its importance for User Experience, and its pros and cons.

What is Card Sorting? Revealing User Mental Models

Card sorting is a qualitative and quantitative method used to understand how users group items or concepts. Participants receive cards. Each card shows a piece of content, a feature, or a concept from your website or app. Examples include “Product Catalog,” “Order History,” “Contact Us,” “Shipping Information,” and “FAQs.” They are then asked to sort these cards into groups that make sense to them.

The main idea is to watch and study how different users group the same items. This shows their mental model – their personal view of how information should be arranged and connected.

The goal is to clarify your product’s information architecture. This covers website navigation, menu layouts, content categories, and how features are organised in an app. When you align your structure with how users think, your product becomes more intuitive and easier to navigate.

Card sorting helps answer questions like:

• Which items do users think belong together?
• What labels do users use for groups of information?
• How do users conceptually organize the content domain?

It shifts design away from internal assumptions and departmental silos. Instead, it focuses on real user understanding. This change improves findability and usability.

How Card Sorting Works

Card sorting can be conducted in a few different ways, and the process involves several distinct steps:

Types of Card Sorting:

1. Open Card Sort: Participants are given the cards and asked to group them in any way they think makes sense. After grouping, they are asked to create and name the categories themselves.
   • Best For: Discovering how users naturally group content, identifying potential category labels from the user’s vocabulary. Useful early in a project when exploring potential structures.
2. Closed Card Sort: Participants are given the cards and a predefined set of category names. They are asked to place each card into one of the existing categories.
   • Best For: Testing a proposed information architecture or set of category labels. Do users understand the categories as intended? Can they find where items should go? Useful for validating or refining an existing structure.
3. Hybrid Card Sort: Participants are given predefined categories but also have the option to create new categories if an item doesn’t fit or if they feel a new category is needed.
   • Best For: Getting feedback on a proposed structure while still allowing for the discovery of unexpected groupings or missing categories.

The Card Sorting Process:

1. Define Scope & Select Cards: Determine what part of your site or app’s information architecture you want to study. Select the specific content items, features, or concepts that will be represented by cards. Use clear, concise labels for each card. Aim for a manageable number of cards (typically 30-60 for open sorts, more for closed).
2. Recruit Participants: Select participants who are representative of your target user audience. Recruit a sufficient number to identify patterns (minimum 15 participants is often recommended, but more is better for statistical analysis).
3. Choose Your Method:
   • In-Person: Physical cards and a table/wall. Allows for rich observation and probing “why” participants made certain choices.
   • Remote (Moderated): Using screen sharing with digital card sorting tools. Still allows for observation and questioning.
   • Remote (Unmoderated): Using online card sorting software where participants complete the task on their own. Enables larger participant numbers and faster data collection, but lacks observational depth.
4. Conduct the Session:
   • Explain the purpose and the task clearly.
   • For open sorts, instruct them to group and then name the groups. For closed sorts, instruct them to place cards into the provided categories.
   • Encourage participants to think aloud as they sort (in moderated sessions).
   • Do not provide guidance on how to sort, just clarify the task if needed.
   • Record the session (with permission) and take notes, especially on participant commentary.
5. Analyze the Results: This is the most complex step.
   • Compile the data: Record how each participant grouped the cards. Online tools automate this.
   • Look for patterns: Identify which cards were frequently grouped together across participants. Analyze what labels were used for similar groups in open sorts. Analyze where cards were placed in closed sorts.
   • Use analysis tools: Software can generate matrices and dendrograms (tree diagrams) that visually represent the commonalities in sorting behavior and suggest potential category structures.
   • Interpret the findings: Don’t just look at the numbers; understand why users grouped items certain ways based on their commentary or common logical connections.
6. Translate Findings into Design: Use the identified common groupings and preferred labels to refine or design your website structure, navigation menus, and category labels.

Card sorting needs careful planning and deep analysis. This helps uncover useful insights for information architecture design.

Why Card Sorting is Essential

Card sorting is an important tool for UX researchers. It helps with usability, especially in findability. Its importance stems from:

1. Aligning with User Mental Models: It’s the most direct way to understand how your target users think about your product’s content and features, ensuring the information architecture matches their expectations.
2. Designing User-Centered Navigation: Basing navigation labels and structures on how users group items makes the system intuitive. Users can more easily predict where to find information if it’s organized according to their own logic.
3. Determining Logical Groupings: It provides empirical data on which items users feel naturally belong together, helping designers create logical and predictable categories.
4. Identifying User-Preferred Terminology: In open card sorts, the category labels users create offer valuable insights into the language they use and understand, which can inform navigation labels and terminology used throughout the interface.
5. Improving Findability: When information architecture aligns with user mental models, users can find information more quickly and with less frustration.
6. Reducing Confusion and Errors: Clear organization based on user understanding minimizes the chances of users getting lost or clicking down the wrong path.
7. Providing Evidence for Design Decisions: Card sorting provides concrete user data to justify design choices related to navigation and structure, helping gain stakeholder buy-in.
8. Highlighting User Differences: Analyzing results can reveal if different user groups have significantly different mental models, suggesting a need for personalized navigation or multiple ways to access content.

Card sorting uses user understanding to shape information architecture. This method helps create products that feel intuitive from the start. It’s an important step before settling on a structural design.

Pros and Cons of Card Sorting

Card sorting is a powerful technique, but like any method, it has strengths and weaknesses that dictate when and how it should be used.

Pros of Card Sorting:

• Directly Reflects User Thinking: Provides unique insight into how users mentally categorize content.
• Relatively Simple and Low-Cost: Easy to explain to participants and conduct with minimal equipment (physical cards) or affordable online tools.
• Provides Clear Data for IA: Generates data that directly informs decisions about grouping and labeling content.
• Collaborative Potential: Can be a highly engaging activity for design teams to participate in and observe.
• Highlights Mental Model Differences: Useful for identifying variations in how different user segments organize information.
• Flexible Methods: Can be conducted in-person for depth or remotely for scale.

Cons of Card Sorting:

• Doesn’t Test Findability in Context: It shows how users might group items but doesn’t simulate the experience of searching for something within a live interface.
• Requires Careful Analysis: Interpreting results, especially from open sorts with many different category names, requires skill and analytical tools.
• Focus on Potential Structure, Not Task Success: While it informs structure, it doesn’t directly measure if users can complete specific tasks using that structure (that’s for usability testing).
• Dependent on Card Quality: Poorly worded or ambiguous card labels can confuse participants and skew results.
• Doesn’t Capture “Why”: While observation and questioning help, the method’s primary output is how items are grouped, not necessarily the underlying reasons or context.
• Can Be Time-Consuming: Setting up, recruiting, conducting sessions, and analyzing data, especially for moderated studies, takes time.

Card sorting works well with other UX research methods, like usability testing. Usability testing can show if the information architecture from card sorting works well for real tasks.

Conclusion on Card Sorting

Card sorting is a key technique for User Experience professionals. It helps in designing clear and effective information architecture. By involving users in sorting content and features, card sorting shows their natural mental models. It also highlights how they prefer to group information.

Card sorting can be an open exploration of user categories or a closed validation of proposed structures. The data collected is invaluable. It offers a user-centered base for building navigation systems, menus, and content groupings. This aligns with how users think and boosts findability and usability.

Card sorting is a simple but powerful method. It helps translate user logic into product structure. While it should be part of a broader research strategy, it stands out on its own. For teams creating products with many pages or features, card sorting is essential. Investing time in this method ensures users can easily find what they need. This leads to a more successful and user-friendly experience.