You can include images to illustrate or clarify the text on your cards, or you can include images on their own. Resize all your images before you upload them if you want them to be the same size, and preview your card sort to make sure it looks how you want it to.
Giving each image a descriptive label will make your analysis easier. For closed card sorts, you need to create enough categories that people can find a home for most of your cards, but not too many that only include categories that match your intentions for your website or your research questions.
For example, if you run an open card sort with 40 cards containing grocery items, you might find that some people group the items by type vegetables, fruit, dairy and some by meal breakfast, lunch, dinner. The number and type of categories you set for a hybrid card sort will determine whether the card sort is more open or more closed. Since one of the goals of card sorting is to get inside the minds of the people you design for, take time to establish, recruit, and manage participants that will give you the most true-to-life data.
For card sorting participants, we recommend:. You can recruit participants in a bunch of different ways, and how you do so will depend on a few different factors.
Similarly, you could invite people via your social media channels or add banners to your website. You can also make use of high-quality recruitment panels, which can be effective if you want fast, pain-free options with minimal effort. You can recruit participants from quite specific demographics, and be confident that the participants will take your study seriously they are getting paid, after all.
Running an in-person, moderated card sort with 5 to 15 participants will give you invaluable qualitative insights to go with the quantitative numbers you get by running the card sort online. If you lack the time or resources to invite participants to in-person sessions, your next best option is to use a service such as UserTesting. Running an open card sort with OptimalSort is a generative exercise: the results give you lots of ideas of how you could label and organize your website content.
As such, the quantitative numbers you need for techniques like tree testing and first-click testing may not be your objective. Also, keep in mind that the more participants you have completing your card sort, the potential for more complexity in your analysis increases as well.
This is simply because narrowing down the most effective structure from 40 different suggested categorizations will probably be an easier task than from different suggestions. Every card sort you run with OptimalSort will present you with a Results Overview and Participant data. The Results Overview tells you big picture information about your card sort.
The Participants table displays useful information about every participant who started your card sort, and can be used to filter your data. At any time during your card sort or analysis, you can:. The Categories tab is a great doorway into your open and hybrid card sorting results. A useful way to explore the categories results and refine your data is to standardize categories that have similar labels with different wording, spelling, capitalizations, and so on and contain similar cards.
In a hybrid card sort, your set categories are already standardized. You can use both exploratory and statistical analysis approaches to do this. When we place every category that uses the same words or phrases into a standardized category, we can assess the effectiveness of the category by looking at the agreement score. The agreement score tells you the agreement level between the cards that participants placed in each category.
Beside the agreement score, you can see the number of participants included in that score. Once you standardize a category, check the agreement score to get an objective assessment of how similar the groupings are. An agreement score of. A perfect agreement score is 1. So, what now? The number of participants who placed the card in that category will tell you something important as well: out of 15 people, 13 people put the bottom two cards into that category, and 15 put the first card in that category.
So we can be confident that most participants who created this group think these cards belong here. Instead, we can undo this group, and then re-standardardized including just the 13 participants who had similar sets of cards, and now we have an agreement score of.
A high level of agreement over about. As well as looking at the cards and assessing the agreement score, head over to the Standardization grid to see your standardized categories in more detail.
The grid simply shows you how the number of times a particular card appears in a standardized category. Allows you to have many participants in many locations. You do not get information on why participants sort the cards the way they do, because you cannot see the participants or hear them thinking out loud.
Best Practices for Card Sorts Limit the number of cards. It is tempting to want the participant to sort "ALL" of your content, but be mindful of participant fatigue. We would recommend 30 to 40 at the absolute outside, especially for an open sort. If possible, randomize the order of presentation so that each piece of content has a chance to be sorted earlier in the session.
Provide the participants with an estimate of how long the card sort will take before beginning the session to help them better gauge the required time and effort.
Consider the benefits of requiring participants to complete your sort. For an open sort, if possible consider requiring them to sort the cards, but perhaps not to label them, since that might be the more challenging part of the task, providing you have limited your items as suggested in point 1 Consider an open sort as part 1 and a closed sort as part 2 of your process. One allows you to learn what goes together, while 2 allows you to really test out your labels to see if they are intuitive to your participants.
Topics can be phrases or words, very specific or more general. As a suggestion, limit yourself to topics or less. This means there might not be a card to sort for every page on the site. Identify the most important or most frequently used content Decide whether you will be doing a physical card sort or using online card-sorting software.
If you are using online card-sorting software, consult the software instructions. If you will be conducting a card sort using physical cards, write each topic on a separate index card.
Use self-adhesive labels and a word processor. The cards will be neat, legible, and consistent. You'll have the list of topics in the computer for later analysis. Number the cards in the bottom corner or on the back. This helps you when you begin to analyze the cards. Have blank cards available for participants to add topics and to name the groups they make when they sort the cards.
Consider using a different colored card for having participants name the groups. Set-up the session Plan about one hour for each session, longer if you have many cards. Arrange the space. A conference room works well. For online card-sorts, ensure there is a computer with an internet connection available as well as room for both the participant s and facilitator to sit comfortably.
Plan to have the facilitator or another usability team member take notes as the participant works and thinks aloud. When you want to know where on the website users expect certain content to be. When you want to get some inspiration for labeling and grouping content on the website.
When you want to find out if there are different groups of people who understand the content of the website differently and would look for the same content in other places.
When should I decide on a closed card sort? When you want to know if people would sort a piece of information into the same category as you would. When you have different variants of categories, and you want to decide on which ones to use in your design, depending on how intuitive they are. Here are some additional things to keep in mind when preparing a card sorting study: Avoid having too few cards so you can collect enough data from the respondents.
Fewer than 30 cards make it hard for grouping to emerge as fewer cards provide less context for the respondents to form a big picture. Having to think about which cards to include in the card sort is a good thing for deciding which of the cards are the most relevant. What can you learn with Card Sort? Conclusion Card sorting is an incredibly useful method when it comes to information architecture research. Previous post. Next post. The Best UX resources Try our Free plan.
Try UXtweak for free. Card sorting. Session recording. Tree testing. Variations in card sorting involve whether or not users can create their own category names, whether a facilitator moderates the session, and whether the study is conducted with paper or a digital tool.
Card sorting is a well-established method within the information-architecture field. In fact, a card-sorting study done today will look exactly the same as the photo of a study we did 23 years ago — at least if using physical cards and not a software solution. There are many ways to run a study and the variations above are by no means a comprehensive account of all the possible types of card sorts, but they are the most common.
Card sorting is a highly useful technique in information architecture; it is used to understand how users think about your content. Card sorting can be supplemented with other information-architecture methods to identify issues in your category structure.
She specializes in helping organizations utilize principles of user-centered design and strategic communication to achieve their goals.
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