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Card Sorting - complex architectures made simple
Article content courtesy of Usability 2.0: Usability Blog by Raena Jackson Armitage
Let's say you're building a new intranet for a company. The site has pages upon pages of thrilling content that, until now, has been utterly disorganized. You could have a go at rearranging and categorizing it yourself, but that may be tricky -- especially if you're unfamiliar with the subject matter. Eek! What do you do?
Card sorting is an easy way to help organize larger quantities of content into a meaningful structure. The right time to do it is when you're ready to start organizing the information. The objective is to discover an intuitive and meaningful classification for topics by asking some prospective users of the system -- in our intranet example, this would be a group of company employees -- to organize the information in a manner that makes sense to them. We do this by writing the name of each topic onto a card, shuffling the deck, and then asking a user or a group of users to sort the cards into groups according to broad subject areas. As the users sort the cards, you observe, ask questions, and take notes.
Card sorting tests can be broadly organized into two types: in an open card sorting exercise, your users will invent their own groups, give them a name, and sort cards into each. In a closed exercise, you specify the groups for them and the users sort the cards. If you're fairly sure of the groupings you'd like to use on the site, or if your client has already specified a broad set of topics, a closed test is the right choice for you. If you're unsure, perhaps an open test is better.
Running a card sorting exercise is quite fun, and it's probably easier than you think.
The manual "proper" method:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/09/play-your-cards-right-run-your-first-card-sort/
Nice easy online collaborative methods: