Micah Bowers
Micah helps businesses craft meaningful engagement through branding, illustration, and design.
Users shouldn’t need insider knowledge to find what they’re looking for on the web. Card sorting lets designers create intuitive UX by organizing content the way customers do in their minds.
Users shouldn’t need insider knowledge to find what they’re looking for on the web. Card sorting lets designers create intuitive UX by organizing content the way customers do in their minds.
Micah helps businesses craft meaningful engagement through branding, illustration, and design.
Businesses typically have a more nuanced understanding of their products than customers do. When a group of people spends 40 hours a week, week after week, poring over a product’s details and fixing its problems, they learn things about it that normal humans never would.
It’s actually pretty cool. They become experts.
But they also develop blind spots, especially when it’s time to market their product. Industry-specific knowledge, so useful in meetings and on the production floor, ends up confusing customers.
We see this a lot on the web.
Say you want to buy a durable, waterproof watch. You have a brand in mind, go to their site, and find a dropdown menu full of obscure model numbers. What good is that?
When a company structures its website like an internal document, relying on product classifications and insider terminology that customers don’t comprehend (or care about), it creates UX friction. Bounce rates balloon, conversion shrivels, and users abandon all hope of finding what they’re looking for.
Luckily, businesses don’t have to settle for websites with poorly organized content.
There’s a way to learn what customers know, what they think they know, and how they prioritize information (a.k.a. mental models).
Card sorting is a generative UX research method that reveals users’ mental models by having them arrange topics into groups that make sense to them.
Designers use the data from a card sort to improve an app or website’s information architecture, a design factor that profoundly affects people’s ability to find the content they’re looking for and carry out the tasks they want to complete.
There’s immense benefit here. Card sorting allows businesses to create intuitive user experiences by organizing and categorizing content the way customers do in their minds.
Most UX research methods can be conducted in a variety of ways, and card sorting is no different. There’s…
There’s also a reverse card sort (a.k.a. tree test) where users are given a collection of cards that are pre-organized into categories and subcategories and asked to complete tasks by navigating from the top down.
In general, the step-by-step process of a card sort is straightforward. To get the most accurate results, plan to test 15-30 people. After 30 people, card sorting fails to yield a substantially clearer picture of users’ mental models.
Step 1: Select Topics
Step 2: Think Aloud
Step 3: Create Groups
Step 4: Name Groups
Step 5: Ask Questions
Step 6: Combine Groups (Optional)
Once the card sort is complete, the real fun begins. All the user data collected needs to be analyzed and placed into a report that can be shared with designers and project stakeholders.
The report will reveal the mental associations and assumptions users make about the test content. It will also highlight words or topics that are confusing or potentially advantageous. All of this can be used to refine an app or website’s information architecture.
Step 1: Organize the Data
Step 2: Evaluate Qualitative vs. Quantitative Information
There are two types of information that can be extracted from a card sort:
Step 3: Review Notes and Recordings
Step 4: Digitally Analyze and Visualize
Step 5: Create a Report
When people come to a website, they don’t want to search, decipher, or interpret. They want to find what they’re looking for—fast. No other UX research method matches card sorting’s ability to illuminate the inner workings of user mental models. Practically speaking, it’s affordable, simple to conduct, and relatively intuitive for users to participate in.
A seamless user experience is built on big questions. Questions like:
Card sorting unearths all these UX treasures and equips designers to engage the nuances of information architecture with confidence rather than conjecture.
UX card sorting is a research method that helps businesses understand how customers order and associate information in their mind (mental models). The data that comes from a card sorting exercise is used to improve an app or website’s information architecture design.
Content strategy is all about planning, making, delivering, and maintaining content (images, words, multimedia, etc). Content strategy is important in user experience design because people want to easily find and interact with content that is both useful and meaningful.
Information architecture is a discipline focused on organizing, naming, and structuring content in a way that is easily findable and usable. The primary concern is helping users find what they’re looking for so that they can complete the tasks they want to.
A good content strategy is comprehensive, meaning it considers all avenues and instances that a user might interact with the content. It is also ongoing. Times and tastes change, and content strategists must adapt or content may become less useful or lose meaning and impact with users.
Businesses often structure the content on a website according to industry-specific knowledge that customers don’t have. Information architecture looks to organize a website in a way that makes sense to the customer—meaning they find the content they’re looking for so they can complete desired tasks.
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