Card Sorting is a Usability technique used to gather user input to guide the organization of content to create more effective site organization. Traditionally, card sorting was a facilitated in-person activity but now card sorting is commonly conducted using online tools that reduce geographic limitations, time commitment, and facilitate aggregation of results.
Card Sorting can provide guidance on: website structure, homepage organization, and verbiage for categories and navigation. We typically begin with one to two rounds of open card sorts where participants organize cards representing potential site content into groups that make sense to them.
Based upon an analysis of the results of the open card sort, we identify potential groupings for content and user-suggested labeling for these groups. We typically conduct a further round of closed card sorting where participants organize the cards into provided categories to test the efficacy of the categories and confirm that they make sense to users with a high degree of agreement.
