The Game of Designs: Card Sorting

Card sorting is an innovative method of getting valuable insights about how your web content should be organized in order to meet the expectations of your audience. In card sorting session, participants organize the topics into categories. It’s one of the best practices in user experience design and a very useful approach for designing the workflow &architecture of the application.

Types of Card Sorting:

Open Card Sort : In open card sort method, Participants are asked to organize the topics into groups and then name each group created in a way that they feel accurately describes the content.It helps to classify the cards in terms of the categories. We use this sorting to discover the patterns which in turn to generate ideas for organizing information.
Closed Card Sort :A closed card sort works best when you are working with a pre-defined set of categories. In this exercise, participants are provided group names, and are asked to place each of the cards into one of the pre-established groups. In this sorting, participants begin can make changes to the group names, and also add new groups, rename groups, and remove groups.

How to do Card Sorting:

To conduct a card sort, you can use stickies, pieces of paper, or any online card-sorting software tools.   Also, participants can go in old school way and use “Pen and Paper” to do card sort

Benefits of Card Sorting

Card sorting will help understanding users’ expectations for the product. It is often most useful once user have done some homework to find out about their users and understand the content. Knowing how your users group information can help you:

• Better structure our products and websites.
• This exercise is fast and you can run it as many times you need until you get the data.
• Users can able to determine whether product succeeds or not.