Card sorting
Card sorting is an exercise that can help you arrange things into useful categories that match the way most people would group or label them.
Categorising things like skills can be useful if you are designing the modules for an educational course, or designing how courses are presented on your website.
You might think you can just do this based on your own knowledge. But you’d be surprised how often your personal idea of categories and labels is not the same as other people’s.
Card sorting lets you find a set of categories that makes sense to most people. Maybe your instinctive categories are correct? But if you’ve run a card sort, you can be sure of it.
You can run a card sort in person using real cards, or online using a virtual whiteboard like Mural or Miro, or dedicated card sorting software like Optimal Sort.
How to run a card sort
Write down each thing you’d like to categorise on a separate card. Then ask your users to take each card and put it into a group.
If you’re doing this in person with real cards, remember to take a high-resolution picture of the groups before you pick up the cards for the next person. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing away your results!
If you’re using a virtual whiteboard, you should give each participant their own copy of the whiteboard.
If you’re using dedicated card sorting software, it should take care of the recording and some of the analysis for you.
Ways to run a card sort
There are 3 ways you can run a card sort:
Open:
In an open card sort you do not give people any pre-defined categories to sort things into. They choose and label their own categories. This can be a useful type of card sort to do first, when you don’t have any information about how people categorise things.
Closed:
In a closed card sort you tell people all the categories at the start, and ask them to sort the items into only those categories. This can be a useful type of card sort to do later, when you want to test the categories that you think might work.
Hybrid:
In a hybrid card sort you give people some categories, but also let them make up their own. Use this like you would a closed card sort, but when you based your categories on a limited amount of information, and you reckon you might have missed a category or two.
Interpreting the results
For an in-person card sort with real cards, or using a virtual whiteboard, you’ll have some work to do work to analyse the results. A dedicated digital card-sorting tool like Optimal Sort will do some of the analysis for you.
To analyse the results of a card sort, look for:
- categories that lots of users create,
- things they consistently sort into the same category,
- things that often get paired together in the same category