Remember that you are the one who is doing the thinking, not the technique… you are the one who puts it all together into a great solution. Follow your instincts, take some risks, and try new approaches.
Donna Spencer (the creator of the card sorting methodology
Card sorting is a research technique that helps you discover how people understand and categorize information, and ensures you create an information architecture that matches users’ expectations. In a card sort, participants sort labeled cards into groups. You can then use the results of your participants’ card sorts to give you ideas about how to group and label the information on your website* in a way that makes the most sense to your audience.
Card sorting is useful when you want to:
*We’ve used the word ‘website’ here and throughout this guide, but you could be organizing information in an app, an intranet, a TV program guide, a form, a board game or anything where information might be organized in a structure to make sense.
Card sorting involves creating a set of cards that each represent a concept or item, and asking people to group the cards in a way that makes sense to them.
Let’s say you’re working on redesigning a city council website and you want to understand how your users categorize the different content and information that will be on the site. You’ll add in a bunch of cards (these could be text or images, but more on that later) which will look like this in setup:
And look like this to your study participants:
There are three approaches to card sorting: open, closed and hybrid. Which approach you use will depend on what you want to find out. We’ll go into further detail on each method below, but here’s a high-level introduction to how they work:
Card sorting is most useful when you’ve already got the information or content you need to organize, but you’re just not sure exactly how to organize it.
Using the city council website as an example, you want to redesign how information is grouped together across the entire site. Card sorting will help you discover where people would commonly expect to find a category on your website.
You simply present them with a list of cards containing the names of items, concepts or labels and have users sort them into groups that make sense to them.
While card sorting is typically used in the early stages of the design process, when there’s no fixed information architecture (IA), it’s also common to use the technique to make changes to an IA, later down the line.
The three card sorting techniques — open, closed, and hybrid — will each tell you something different about how people understand and group your information. Choosing the right technique at the right time is key to gathering high-quality, relevant data to inform your design decisions.
It’s also the best place to start. Let’s take a deep dive into each of the card sorting methods…
Information architecture (IA) is the system and structure you use to organize and label content on your website, app or product. It determines the paths people take to find the information they need, and where they might get lost, and it’s the foundation on top of which you provide the design. This means that while users will never see this underlying structure on it’s own, they will feel the effects of the decisions you make here.
IA isn’t actually any one thing, it’s made up of multiple smaller parts including:
The overall goal of an IA should be to help people find the information they’re looking for – whether that’s on a website or mobile app, or in physical spaces like libraries and stores.
Understandably, there’s a lot that goes into developing an IA. Here, we’ll give a high-level overview of the process of developing an IA and how you can test and evaluate one.
There are a few best practices to keep in mind when thinking about your IA – principles you should always try and adhere to.
What an information architect does and what information architecture (IA) is are two distinct things.
An information architect will oversee things like website navigation and user experience, while IA (the term) relates to the system and structure of websites and applications. Information architects will also work with other departments to ensure information is presented to users clearly.
In many cases, organizations won’t actually have a dedicated information architect. Instead, the duties and tasks typically associated with the role will be carried out by designers, content strategists, developers and product managers.
Developing an IA is an extremely complex and involved process. The key to a successful IA is understanding your users, the information they seek, and the ways in which they go about finding it. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why the IAs of so many websites and even physical places end up reflecting internal organizational thinking instead of that of the users.
But how do organizations fall into this trap in the first place? In most cases, it’s simply because there’s little effort made to go out and actually learn from users.
Here are some of the top IA mistakes:
This quote by Paul Boag will likely sound familiar to many who have been through the process of a website redesign: “So many things can go wrong when creating a site’s information architecture. Often it turns into a political battleground between rival departments each seeking to have their area of responsibility highlighted at the highest level of the site”.
So how do you actually develop an IA? Here’s a very high-level overview of the steps involved:
One of the golden rules with IA development is that you should test early – and often. As we mentioned above, card sorting in the first stages of your IA project will help you keep the focus on your users when working out your content groupings. You can then use another user testing technique, tree testing, to understand how people navigate through your website structure before you ever start designing or writing code.
For existing IAs, evaluation is a critical step in the process of improvement. It can help to think about it in terms of a website redesign. For example, are there any pages that your users struggle to find? If you never benchmark your existing IA, how will figure out if the new one is any better?
When evaluating an IA, ensure you understand the top tasks your users perform and the content that sits within it.
Identifying your top tasks means stripping away all of the extra detail and getting to the root of what really matters to your users.
There are several ways to identify these tasks.
Next, you need to identify every piece of content that sits within your IA. One of the most popular ways to take stock of your content is through a content audit.
In short, a content audit involves creating a list of every article, page, video and landing page and assessing it. How long is it? Do users actually use it? Could it be updated or otherwise improved?
You can read about how we audited the content on our blog here.
Tree testing is a usability technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website. It’s also known as ‘reverse card sorting’ or ‘card-based classification’. Tree testing is done on a simplified text version of your site structure – without the influence of navigation aids and visual design.
Tree testing tells you how easily people can find information on your website, and exactly where people get lost. Your website visitors rely on your IA – how you label and organize your content – to get things done. Tree testing can answer questions like:
Card sorting is a well-established research technique for discovering how people understand and categorize information. You can use card sorting results to group and label your website information in a way that makes the most sense to your audience.
Card sorting is useful when you want to: