Card sort to intuitiveness Designing structures and navigation that make sense Our goal today Talk about card sorting as a method Design, conduct, and analyze card sorts Design product navigation and content structure based on results 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 2 Who’s talking? Dimiter Simov – Jimmy Usability professional since 1999, currently with SAP Labs Bulgaria UX mentor and trainer Founder of the 1st BG usability consultancy Likes to raise usability awareness Believes that IT can be usable 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 3 Who’s listening Your background and motivation to be here? 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 4 ABOUT 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 5 Card sorting is a design method Activity: Grouping | Naming | Placing Elements: Objects | Concepts | Names Result: Relations | Terminology | Categories Goal: Structure, user-centered one Participants: Representative users 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 6 Good for Designing new products, Expanding existing ones by adding new functionality or content, Redesigning old products. 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 7 Benefits Product: websites and apps easier to use, simpler, more intuitive, faster, safer to navigate Users: more efficient and more effective The business: more profitable You: better designer, fulfilled professional 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 8 Strait and reverse card sorting Strait: users work with a set of items and group them in some way Reverse: users place items in an existing structure 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 9 Open and closed Open: users make their own groups Closed: users work with a predefined set of groups Hybrid: combination of the above: there are preset groups but users can also create their own 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 10 Open, closed, or hybrid Open: for general purpose sorts and unexplored grounds Closed: for checking or expanding existing structure Hybrid: might be the best choice as we people are good at recognizing 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 11 Open and hybrid compared Study on tripadvisor.com: compared open and hybrid sorts with the same sets of cards Strong correlation between Atlantic City and Las Vegas observed in both sorts Open: most often in category North America Hybrid: in category Casinos 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 12 Online and offline Online users work with a software tool, web-based unmoderated (usually) Offline users work with physical cards or objects moderated 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 13 What to sort Vocabulary User tasks and goals Objects | Images 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 14 Careful with superficial matches Consider: Manage and holidays Absenceabsence and holidays Coping with difficult colleagues Manage difficult colleagues Change management Users may just group similar ones together The first two 'manage' not essential Rephrasing prevents unwanted grouping Example from http://www.interactiondesign.org/encyclopedia/card_sorting.html 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 15 Time to sort varies Based on medium, familiarity, interruptions… Example 110 cards, online, hybrid sort, high familiarity average: 42 min, fastest: 20 min, slowest: 72 min According to William Hudson 20 min for 30 items 30 min for 50 items 60 min for 100 items 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 16 # of cards per person per sort 50 is a good number 80 is manageable 100 + might be too much Too many cards would bore and tire users, so splitting leads to better results 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 17 # cards per project Splitting works well: every user sorts a different subset Analyzing many cards is difficult 50 is a good number 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 18 # of users Jakob Nielsen recommends 15 (even 12 might work) 30 for projects with “lavish funding” Note: Nielsen speaks of moderated card sorts. “Much of the value from card sorting comes from listening to the users' comments as they sort the cards: knowing why people place certain cards together gives deeper insight into their mental models than the pure fact that they sorted cards into the same pile.” 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 19 # of users Jeff Sauro calculates based on the margin of error Smaller margin means more confidence that the results are close to the “real" thing 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness Sample Size 10 21 30 39 53 93 115 147 193 263 381 597 1064 Margin of Error (+/-) 27% 20% 17% 15% 13% 10% 9% 8% 7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 20 ANALYSIS 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 21 Grouping 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 22 Group agreement 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 23 Similarity 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 24 Tree (Dendrogram) 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 25 Agreement (IA proposal) 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 26 TOOLS 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 27 SimpleCardSort The tool we will use was kindly provided for this workshop by David Humpherys I will encourage you to further explore the tool and use it http://simplecardsort.com/ 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 28 Tools Online Usability test Optimal Sort UserZoom SimpleCardSort ConceptCodify www.usabilitest.com www.optimalworkshop.com www.userzoom.com www.simplecardsort.com conceptcodify.com Desktop SynCaps www.syntagm.co.uk/design/cardsortdl.shtml 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 29 NOW TO SOME EXERCISES 5-Jun-2014 UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness 30