Card Sorting. UX technique to categorize content – | Blog

Is UX research technique consists of arranging cards and helps to check, define and order the categorization of the contents.

What is a Card Sorting

Yusef Hassan Montero and Francisco Martín Fernández define Card Sorting as: The technique of observing how users group and associate with each other a predetermined number of cards labeled with the different thematic categories of the website.

Simply, this consists of the participants organizing the cards that have the contents, categories and navigation menus of the website written on them.

It helps us to know the mental model of the users and how they would look for the contents and the functionalities within the web. Ultimately, it helps us create with users in mind.

When to do a Card Sorting

It can be done on different occasions, for example: when we want to know in which categories to group the information, when we want to name the links or categories or check an information architecture already established on a website.

To carry out the test in general features we need:

• Creation of the cards.
• Users for the test (10 – 12 users).
• List of elements to group.
• List of initial categories (Optional).

Types of Card Sorting

There are two types of Card Sorting: open and closed.

In the open one, the user can group the categories freely and it helps to know what type of category classification is more correct, while in the closed one, the groups are already predefined and the user places each category in the group that they think is most accurate.

How to carry out a Card Sorting

These are the necessary and specific steps to guarantee the success of the test of Card Sorting:

• Define terms: If they are from a navigation bar, a dropdown menu, etc. It is advisable to ask users for the terms they would use through a survey before doing the test.
• Creation of the cards: Each of the cards must have the term written with the possibility that another term can be written. The cards must be numbered on the back to improve the UX designer’s subsequent analysis and treatment.
• Pilot test: It is advisable to carry out a pilot test before the real test, to check that everything will work correctly.
• Recruit 10 – 12 users for the real test: For this type of test, it is normal to carry out with 10 – 12 users and not exceed 40 cards.
• Explain to the user what to do: It is necessary to explain to the users participating in the test what it consists of, how it is done with a brief example and that we are not really examining them, but rather the design of our website or application.
• Store and record: We must store the verbal reasoning that users make when performing the test (Field Notes) and record the number of groupings and their content.
• Qualitative analysis: In the test, it is convenient that the expert, through observation, discover which of the terms offered the greatest difficulty to the participants, if some terms were not understood, what other terms were proposed by the users, etc.
• Quantitative analysis: Co-occurrence analysis, dendrogram, etc. are performed.
• Conclusions: The sequential order is defined taking into account the quantitative and qualitative data.

They exist that allow us to do Card Sorting remotely through digital means such as: .

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