Card Sorting is a popular UXD (User Experience Design) exercise for exploring aspects of a website’s Information Architecture.
A series of items are written onto cards or Post-It notes and then participants are asked to group them in a way that seems logical to them.
The aim is to understand how users would expect content to be structured within a website.
In an Open Card Sort participants create their own names for the groups. This is can be great for generating ideas around labelling, revealing how participants instinctively classify content. Closed Card Sorting, where the labels are pre-determined, can yield more quantitive results, so is good for helping to meaningfully compare outcomes across multiple sorts.
It might seem a bit low-tech but exploring somewhat abstract ideas in such a tactile exercise can really simplify the process of arriving at solutions for grouping information.
At The Pixel Parlour we often include a collaborative card sorting exercise as part of our Co-Creation Workshops. This helps to tease out ideas around website structure on even the most complex of projects.
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