Posted in Website Usability Testing	January 9, 2008

Card-Sorting

This test is especially helpful if you have a lot of categories or sections and you want to know how users expect to see those organized.

As the name implies, a card sort requires the test participant to sort cards, each with a word or statement printed on it, according to the user's mental model of the relationships between the words or statements. The test facilitator then records the sort in a spreadsheet or in one of the online sorting tools. A cluster analysis of the results from several test participants gives designers an excellent view into what is important to the user and how they refer to it in their own language.

Card sorts can be conducted with individuals and groups depending on what kind of information you are trying to elicit. In either case it's important to leave some blank cards available, as users might want to use words you have not provided.

According to Mark Boulton, there are two types of card sorts:

Closed card sort

• Pre-defined category labels
• Helps identify where things belong in a structure
• Forces participants to think carefully about different categories
• Great validation tool

Open card sort

• Users build architecture from individual items of content upwards
• Provides user generated labels
• Usefull in early stages of a project for exploration

Check out the rest of his three-part card-sorting run through at markboulton.co.uk.

Image source: markboulton.co.uk