Card sorting is one of the most efficient
ways to measure a website's usability. It mainly helps evaluate and design a
site's information architecture. During this process, participants are asked to
organize topics into different categories that make the best sense to them.
Categories may be pre-determined or labeled by them to help you determine the
most appropriate tags/markers to use for the actual web design. Traditionally,
actual cards and pieces of paper are used to conduct a card sort, but professional
usability researchers and UX experts now use card sorting software tools to
make the job easier. Seeking the help of professional usability experts will
help you formulate the best card sorting strategy to use that will yield the
best results for your site's information architecture and design.
Card sorting, like other usability
experience research techniques ultimately help you understand what users expect
from your site and how they understand your layout and your topics. It is most
useful when you have already done your homework to find out about your target
users and the kind of content that is relevant to them. Know
how typical users sort information can help you label categories for proper
navigation, build the structure of the website, and decide what the most
important things to put on the homepage are.
Depending on the needs of your website, you
may choose to do an open or closed card sort. In an open card sort,
participants organize topics from the content within your website into groups
and name each of the groups that they have created in a way that accurately describes
the items or the topics in each category. A closed card sort, on the other
hand, uses pre-defined categories. Researchers also use a combination of these
two techniques, using an open card sort to identify content categories, and
then a closed card sort to see how well the labels work.
