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
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UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness
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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
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UX Sofia’14 Card sort to intuitiveness
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Who’s listening
Your background and motivation to be here?
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ABOUT
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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
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Good for
Designing new products,
Expanding existing ones by adding new functionality
or content,
Redesigning old products.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Online and offline
Online
 users work with a software tool, web-based
 unmoderated (usually)
Offline
 users work with physical cards or objects
 moderated
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What to sort
Vocabulary
User tasks and goals
Objects | Images
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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
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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
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# 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
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# cards per project
Splitting works well:
 every user sorts a different subset
Analyzing many cards is difficult
 50 is a good number
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# 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.”
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# 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
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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%
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ANALYSIS
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Grouping
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Group agreement
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Similarity
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Tree (Dendrogram)
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Agreement (IA proposal)
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TOOLS
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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/
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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
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NOW TO SOME EXERCISES
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