A great information architecture (IA) is essential for a great user experience (UX). And testing your website or app’s information architecture is necessary to get it right.

‍

Card sorting and tree testing are the very best UX research methods for exactly this. But the big question is always: which one should you use, and when? Very possibly you need both. Let’s find out with this quick summary.

‍

What is card sorting and tree testing? 🧐

‍

Card sorting is used to test the information architecture of a website or app. Participants group individual labels (cards) into different categories according to  criteria that makes best sense to them. Each label represents an item that needs to be categorized. The results provide deep insights to guide decisions needed to create an intuitive navigation, comprehensive labeling and content that is organized in a user-friendly way.

‍

Tree testing is also used to test the information architecture of a website or app. When using tree testing participants are presented with a site structure and a set of tasks they need to complete. The goal for participants is to find their way through the site and complete their task. The test shows whether the structure of your website corresponds to what users expect and how easily (or not) they can navigate and complete their tasks.

‍

What are the differences? 🂱 👉🌴

‍

Card sorting is a UX research method which helps to gather insights about your content categorization. It focuses on creating an information architecture that responds intuitively to the users’ expectations. Things like which items go best together, the best options for labeling, what categories users expect to find on each menu.

‍

Doing a simple card sort can give you all those pieces of information and so much more. You start understanding your user’s thoughts and expectations. Gathering enough insights and information to enable you to develop several information architecture options.

‍

Tree testing is a UX research method that is almost a card sort in reverse. Tree testing is used to evaluate an information architecture structure and simply allows you to see what works and what doesn’t. 

‍

Using tree testing will provide insights around whether your information architecture is intuitive to navigate, the labels easy to follow and ultimately if your items are categorized in a place that makes sense. Conversely it will also show where your users get lost and how.

‍

What method should you use? 🤷

‍

You’ve got this far and fine-tuning your information architecture should be a priority. An intuitive IA is an integral component of a user-friendly product. Creating a product that is usable and an experience users will come back for.

‍

If you are still wondering which method you should use - tree testing or card sorting. The answer is pretty simple - use both.

‍

Just like many great things, these methods work best together. They complement each other, allowing you to get much deeper insights and a rounded view of how your IA performs and where to make improvements than when used separately. We cover more reasons why card sorting loves tree testing in our article which dives deeper into why to use both.

‍

Ok, I'm using both, but which comes first? 🐓🥚

‍

Wanting full, rounded insights into your information architecture is great. And we know that tree testing and card sorting work well together. But is there an order you should do the testing in? It really depends on the particular context of your research - what you’re trying to achieve and your situation. 

‍

Tree testing is a great tool to use when you have a product that is already up and running. By running a tree test first you can quickly establish where there may be issues, or snags. Places where users get caught and need help. From there you can try and solve potential issues by moving on to a card sort. 

‍

Card sorting is a super useful method that can be instigated at any stage of the design process, from planning to development and beyond.  As long as there is an IA structure that can be tested again. Testing against an already existing website navigation can be informative. Or testing a reorganization of items (new or existing) can ensure the organization can align with what users expect.

‍

However, when you decide to implement both of the methods in your research, where possible, tree testing should come before card sorting. If you want a little more on the issue have a read of our article here.

‍

Check out our OptimalSort and Treejack tools - we can help you with your research and the best way forward. Wherever you might be in the process.

Despite the abundance of user research methods, card sorting remains one of the best ways to get into the minds of your users and discover how they understand and categorize information.

Given that one of our most popular tools is an online card sorting tool called OptimalSort (You may have heard of it), we thought that we’d answer some common questions about online card sorting – the research method that OptimalSort uses.

Let’s begin!

1. What’s the difference between online and offline card sorting?

Traditional card sorting can be done using paper cards and hosted in-person, hence “offline”. Online card sorting is pretty much what it sounds like: a card sort hosted over the internet. But there’s a little more to it.

Primarily, running a card sort online as opposed to hosting one in person means that the process becomes much easier to facilitate. Instead of needing to schedule a time for your participants to come into an office, you can simply send them a link to your card sort. Then, they can complete the test in their own time.

Note that the very benefits of online card sorting mean that you can lose certain insights gained from an in-person card sort, like understanding why your participants sort cards in a certain way. There are ways around this, however. For example, you could pair your card sorting tool with an online video recording solution.

2. When should you run an online card sort?

Card sorting is best suited to answering specific, information-related questions. For example, maybe you want to rearrange the layout of your magazine? Or perhaps you need to add several new shopping categories to your website.

In the latter example, card sorting is the perfect technique to find out where people would commonly expect to find those categories on your website. In the card sort, you present participants with a list of cards containing the names of items within certain categories and task them with sorting those items into groups that make sense to them. The end result? You have a clear picture of how your users or customers would arrange the content on your website.

Card sorting is useful when you’ve got the information you need to organize, but you’re just not sure how to organize it.

3. Do I need to compensate participants for taking part in my card sort?

Compensation is tricky when it comes to online testing methods like card sorting. While there are no hard and fast rules, you may find that it’s the best way to incentivize people to take part in your study. Now, taking part in an online card sort is much easier than trekking across town to sit down for a user interview, so you may want to offer participants the chance to win a prize for taking part instead of compensating them directly.

Note: Offering a discount for your product or service is a great way to compensate users and encourage the use of your product. 

4. How do I make sense of the data?

Most card sorting tools offer powerful analysis functionality built right into the tool itself, so all you have to worry about is actually putting the card sort together, sending out the links and promoting it.

Using OptimalSort as an example, let’s take a look at some of the analysis functionality and why it’s useful. Other card sorting tools will likely have different analysis options available.

• Participants Table: Review all of the people who took part in your card sort and segment or exclude them.
• Participant-Centric Analysis (PCA): See the most popular grouping strategies as well as the alternatives among those people who disagreed with the first strategy.
• Dendrograms: Quickly spot popular groups of cards and get a sense of how similar or different your participant’s card sorts were.

5. Is online card sorting expensive?

Online card sorting tools can be expensive, but it’s all relative. As just one example of this, online research platforms mean that you’ll likely be gaining access to a whole host of other tools by signing up for an online card sorting tool.

There’s also the fact that it’s a cheaper exercise overall than in-person card sorting as you won’t have to pay as much for compensation, or even use as much of your own time. Time is money!

6. Can I still get qualitative insights from an online card sort?

You can draw qualitative insights directly from the results of an online card sort, but you can also use online card sorting tools alongside participant recording software to build a more holistic understanding. By using recording software, you’ll be able to watch participants as they complete a card sort, and ask them to talk through what they’re doing to learn why they placed cards in a certain way. 

7. How many participants do I need?

In a nutshell, a larger number than you’d probably bring in for a user interview. Aim for between 20 and 30 participants.

Card sorting (whether it’s performed online or offline) is what’s known as a generative user testing method. This means that you’re typically starting without a design, and you’re using the method to get an idea of how people think with regards to the problem you’re trying to solve. A good example of this would be that you’re building a new website, and are using card sorting to learn how people think the content should be grouped and arranged.

Here’s a great quote from Nielsen Norman Group: “There is great variability in different people’s mental models and in the vocabulary they use to describe the same concepts. We must collect data from a fair number of users before we can achieve a stable picture of the users’ preferred structure and determine how to accommodate differences among users”.

8. How many cards should I use?

We recommend aiming for between 30 and 60 cards, as per our comprehensive 101 guide. Why? Because:

• People will be more likely to complete your card sort.
• You’ll only be able to include the most relevant cards, and be forced to discard the rest.
• You’ll get enough useful data and insights to make informed decisions about your website, app or project.

9. What online card sorting tools are available?

There are a number of online card sorting tools available, including our very own OptimalSort, which is one of the tools included in our platform. OptimalSort has a number of useful features to make it easy to set up and run a card sort with participants based all over the world. Once you’ve gathered all of your responses, built-in analysis features can then help you make sense of the data.

Of course, there are other options available. Take a look at this tools map from User Interviews for a comprehensive overview of the major research tools.

10. What do I do after a card sort?

With your card sort done and dusted, it’s time to take that data and build a draft structure of your website or mobile app. Once you’ve put this rough structure together, you can use tree testing to to see how people navigate through it. We’ve got a guide for that too, which you can read here.

Wrap-up

So that’s 10 questions about online card sorting – answered! If you’re interested in diving straight into a card sort of your own, we obviously recommend giving OptimalSort a try (which you can do for free).

Happy testing!

On the fence about card sorting and why you should be using it to improve your user experience? Let’s take a look at why you should take advantage of this powerful user research method.

Simply put, card sorting can help you discover how your users think your content should be organized and categorized. Card sorting gives you insight into how people conceptualize, group and label ideas, enabling you to make confident, informed information architecture (IA) decisions.

What is card sorting?

In a card sort, participants sort cards containing different items into groups. You can use the results to figure out how to group and label the information on your website in a way that makes the most sense to your audience. 

Using card sorting at the start of your website build means you’re able to make decisions based on data, not assumptions. Being informed at the start of your website build can mean saving a lot of time later with revisions or rebuilds. Better to build something intuitive now, than be left wondering later why parts of your website aren’t working as you expect.

When should you use card sorting?

It’s best to do card sort research when you want to answer a specific, information-related question. For example, maybe you’re adding a new range of “natural products” to your Health and Beauty site. On the other hand, you may want to redesign how information is grouped together across your entire website.

Card sorting is at its most effective when you’ve got the information and detail you need but you just need guidance on how it's best (most intuitive) to organize it.

While card sorting is typically used in the early stages of the design process, when there’s no live IA, it’s also common to use the technique to make changes to a live IA down the line. 

Card sorting: A powerful way to understand users’ mental models

Card sorting is a powerful tool to understand your users and how they make sense of information when they arrive on your website. A good rule to keep in mind is that what makes sense to you and your colleagues may not make sense to your users.

Using an online card sorting tool like OptimalSort it can be useful to check in with users to understand where they think information should sit on your website. As product ranges increase or change over time, it can also be useful to undertake card sort research when updating your website. 

Let’s take a look at how card sorting might work for an e-commerce website. 

Imagine you run a health and beauty e-commerce business with an active and successful website with a vast range of products that can be grouped in many different ways. At worst the website is clunky and hard to search, making it difficult for shoppers to find the right product, quickly. At best everything is there but it doesn’t quite answer what the user is looking for. It can be incredibly powerful to have a fuller understanding of how our website is viewed from our shoppers (rather than just internally). The goal of our website should be to showcase our products in a way that makes shopping easy, quick and even intuitive.

We are introducing a full range of natural based products that include products intended for babies, children, women and men. These products have previously  been categorized by who they are intended for. But we want to know if there is a better way that these could be made available, especially with a market shift to an increased demand in  natural based products.

By doing some card sorting with OptimalSort, we gather data from users and the pattern that our audience use to group these products. Through the data analysis we have discovered that a large majority of our users would group by natural products first and then by who the product is intended for (baby, children, women, or men). Armed with this insight (amongst others) we can use it to influence our IA. Ultimately, we end up with a far more intuitive and streamlined user experience (UX).

Three ways to use card sorting

Did you know that there are multiple ways to use OptimalSort card sorting? Let’s take a look– you may be surprised.

1. Building a new website

This is by far the biggest use-case for card sorting. When looking at building a new website or making better use of an existing one, utilizing card sorting at the research stage can be insightful and informative. Seeing your website, products and/or navigation from your end user’s perspective can enlighten, inform and assist in creating an enhanced user experience.

2. Combine card sorting and tree testing

When combined with card sorting, tree testing, with Treejack, can help you to improve your navigation and give you a fuller understanding of how your website is used. Tree testing is a technique for evaluating the findability of topics on a website. It’s also commonly known as reverse card sorting and is the perfect technique to complement card sorting. After you’ve analyzed your card sorting results and transformed them into a draft IA, you can test these insights using a tree test. Using this technique, you task users with seeking as opposed to sorting. This technique aims to replicate the experience of using a website – without visual distractions.

Unlike usability testing, tree testing only focuses on the IA of your website. It makes the process of developing an IA much faster, as you can easily make refinements and tweaks without needing to get bogged down in costly redesigns. 

3. Make collaborative design decisions

You can use OptimalSort to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs — logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on. By creating a closed image sort with categories where your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.

Use OptimalSort to run your first card sort

Card sorting can take place in person, or online with a tool like OptimalSort. OptimalSort gives you the flexibility to conduct moderated and unmoderated card sorts online. Now, you can collect the data you need, how and when you need it. Plus it only takes a few minutes to design and launch your study. 

Not only is OptimalSort simple to use,  but it’s backed up with the strength of powerful analysis functionality. Taking the pain of trawling screeds of information, OptimalSort pulls out useful, usable insights from your card sorting data. This allows you to quickly identify common groups at a glance with comprehensive and vibrant visualizations and use this data to support design changes and recommendations. 

What is 3D Cluster View?

Part of our OptimalSort analysis is the 3D Cluster View (3DCV). While the addition of ‘3D’ may throw off red flags of being a gimmick, it’s actually entirely appropriate. 

The 3DCV basically allows you to visualize the similarity between cards as three-dimensional spatial relationships. Each point in the 3D visualization represents one of the cards from your original sort. Cards that are closer together were more frequently sorted into the same category. Likewise, when you see 2 cards that are quite far apart, they weren’t sorted together as frequently. If you’d like to find out more take a look at OptimalSort 3DCV, we think it’s pretty clever.

Wrap Up

If you’re now interested in a card sort of your own, we obviously recommend OptimalSort (which you can get started with for free). Or you want to find out more, take a look at our Card Sorting 101.

Happy sorting!

This morning Ieavesdroppeda conversation between Amy Worley (@worleygirl) and The SemanticWill™ (@semanticwill) on "the twitters".Aside from recommending two books by Donna Spencer (@maadonna), I asked Nicole Kaufmann, one of the friendly consultants at Optimal Usability, if she had any advice for Amy about reorganising 404 books into categories that make more sense.I don't know Amy's email address and this is much too long for a tweet. In any case I thought it might be helpful for someone else too so here's what Nicole had to say:In general I would recommend having at least three sources of information (e.g. 1x analytics + 1 open card sort + 1 tree test, or 2 card sorts + 1 tree test) in order to come up with a useful and reliable categorisation structure.Here are four options for how you could consider approaching it (starting with my most preferred to least preferred):

Option A

• Pick the 20-25 cards you think will be the most difficult and 20-25 cards that you think will be the easiest to sort and test those in one open card sort.
• Based on the results create one or two sets of categories structures which you can test in a one or two closed card sorts. Consider replacing about half of the tested cards with new ones.
• Based on the results of those two rounds of card sorting, create a categorisation structure and pick a set of difficult cards which you can turn into tasks which you can test in a tree test.
• Plus: Categorisation is revised between studies. Relative easy analysis.
• Minus: Not all cards have been tested. Depending on the number of studies needs about 80-110 participants. Time intensive.

Option B

• Pick the 20-25 cards you think will be the most difficult and 20-25 cards that you think will be the easiest to sort and test those in one open card sort.
• Based on the results do a closed card sort(s) excluding the easiest cards and adding some new cards which haven't been tested before.
• Plus: Card sort with reasonable number of cards, only 40-60 participants needed, quick to analyse.
• Minus: Potential bias and misleading results if the wrong cards are picked.

Option C

• Create your own top level categories (5-8) (could be based on a card sort) and assign cards to these categories, then pick random cards within those categories and set up a card sort for each (5-8).
• Based on the results create a categorisation structure and a set of task which will be tested in a tree test.
• Plus: Limited set of card sorts with reasonable number of cards, quick to analyse. Several sorts for comparison.
• Minus: Potential bias and misleading results if the wrong top categories are picked. Potentially different categorisation schemes/approaches for each card sort, making them hard to combine into one solid categorisation structure.

Option D

• Approach: Put all 404 cards into 1 open card sort, showing each participant only 40-50 cards.
• Plus: All cards will have been tested
• Do a follow up card sort with the most difficult and easiest cards (similar to option B).
• Minus: You need at least 200-300 completed responses to get reasonable results. Depending on your participant sources it may take ages to get that many participants.