Card Sorting: Helping Customers Find Their Way Around Your Product

In the effort to make websites and other digital products increasingly user-friendly, we use card sorting to help us evaluate and plan the information architecture of a site. The aim is to support users in organising and labelling the structure of the site and content in categories using their natural perception rather than the one we or the product owner wishes to impose on them. Think about making sure that apples can be found in the fruit section of an eCommerce grocery store.

The cards are sorted into an architecture that makes sense from the user’s point of view. The method is equally effective whether you use cards, paper, or online card-sorting tools. Our preference is to use actual cards for simple sorts where the site is only two or three levels deep with relatively few pages, but using software works best in terms of time-efficiency for your project where a site gets more complex, and there is potentially lots of content either in place or to be added.

Open or Closed Card Sort methods

There are two main ways to do a card sort, open and closed. In an open card sort the participants use cards to organize a website’s topics into groups that seem logical to them, and then they give each group a name to describe its content.

In a closed card sort participants don’t have to make up the categories themselves. We give the participants the categories and the participants sort the cards into those categories.

Navigation will be improved and website visitors will find it easier to locate products or articles on your pages, resulting in higher conversion rates.

The advantage to card sorting is that it will give you information about how actual users perceive your website, how they see the information on the site and how they find and use it. Ideally, a good card sorting program will generate a user-centered taxonomy (page and section naming system) which will help make the website much more engaging and easy to navigate through. Less deciphering what labels mean before clicking on them is always a good thing for ensuring users can easily use your site. Navigation will be improved and website visitors will find it easier to locate products or articles on your pages, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Once all participants have completed the exercise, we enter the data into a spreadsheet and examine the groupings. If the website is organized in a clear and logical fashion, there will be general agreement about many items. For example, if there is a consensus that “Complaints” should be found under the “Technical Assistance” category, that’s a sign that the website is working well and is easy for users to navigate. We can also see where there is less agreement, and these will be the areas where work needs to be carried out.

You may assume that card sorting involves actual cards, and it does, but there are also newer ways to do it involving software. The advantage of the software is that it allows users from anywhere to participate in the sorting process, and it produces graphs and charts which are useful for helping us unearth more about your user’s expectations. Popular software includes OptimalSort, Websort, and Userzoom.

The disadvantage to the software is you can’t touch it like you can a card. Strangely enough, there is something about sitting in a room and sorting cards that gets users more engaged and generates more information from them. Putting twenty users in a room and pairing them up is the best method for a physical card sort. It often produces nuggets of information in the form of user comments that the moderator can make a note of.

Some useful tips for card sorting:

• Use no more than 100 cards. Too many cards will overwhelm the participants and will undermine the study.
• Keep the sort between 20 to 60 minutes, depending on how many cards are involved. If you have a sort involving 100 cards, you’ll need an hour for the participants to complete it. Fewer cards means less time.
• Whether you do an open or closed sort, give the participants plenty of blank cards and marker pens. This is because many times participants will come up with their own categories for the information, and they might help you to organize your site better.
• Have lots of supplies. Doing this is essential if you’re supervising a sort with real cards. You should have plenty of extra cards, markers, glue or tape (in case they want to make a permanent record of their card organization), and rubber bands (so they can group the cards into categories at the end of the sort).
• Look for patterns in the cards. You can put the results into a spreadsheet, of course, but it’s also useful at first to just look at the cards and how they are grouped. Finding patterns is a tangible way to see how users view a website, and you will get a good idea of patterns of organization. Also, don’t neglect discarded or uncategorized cards. These could indicate user confusion or frustration with aspects of the website.

Card sorting is a reliable, inexpensive method for identifying patterns in how users interact with a website.

Does card sorting always benefit?

Are there disadvantages to card sorting? There are a few – the main one being that card sorting focuses entirely on how to organize a website’s content, which is fine except that if the content doesn’t meet the users needs in the first place, it won’t do any good to organize it better. And then, without skilled guidance, the participants in a card sorting study may get caught up in the surface details of a website and how to streamline their usage, without really identifying if the site is providing them with the right kind of information.

With all that said, however, card sorting is a reliable, inexpensive method for identifying patterns in how users interact with a website. A card sort shows the mental model of the visitors to a site. By understanding that mental model a company can increase findability, which makes the site much easier to use.

Card sorting is becoming more popular as a tool for improving the user experience of websites. In one study, more than half of UX professionals report using card sorting, and the numbers have been growing in the last ten years.

Companies have found there is value in letting users play with cards.