Lets play cards!

Did my first card sorting exercise! As I mentioned in my previous post there are two types of card sorting: open and closed. I’ve decided to do the open one because it was recommended by the majority of UX experts.

I’ve also chosen to do both individual and team card sorts in order to compare which method will give me better results.

So the first video captures the group card sort. The process went pretty smooth. Participants were quite talkative, therefore there was no need for me to start the discussion.

The individual card sort was a bit more complicated because one of the participants didn’t want to talk at all. Only after grouping all the cards, she explained why she divided them this way.

I did the exercise with two groups. In the pictures bellow you can see that groups have the categories with slightly different names and with almost the same content.

The categories of 1st group are Guitar options (setup), More options(switch ukulele) and Instructions.

The categories of 2nd group are Purchase and customize, Tuning and Type of instrument.

Both teams have a category for creating the guitar, which is great because in out app we have a separate button that brings you to another screen where the user can customize it’s own guitar.

Speaking about the tuner. Our tuner app has a main screen that looks like this:

When we were creating the design of the interface we named this main screen “Tuner”. From here the user can read how to tune the instrument, by pressing the “”How to tune” button and from the settings you can choose the “Tuning”. Group 1 and 2 have a category that contains the tuner, instructions for how to tune the instrument and the tunes of guitar and ukulele. So the the organization of our application follows the users’ logic.

The next two pictures display the result of two individual participants. The card sorting of the first person is very similar to the team sort. Although the second participant suggested to make a main category that contains only one card with purchasing a guitar and all the rest categories are the subcategories.

Would I recommend this technique?

In order to understand how to organize your application or website I would recommend to use card sorting technique, although it is a good suggestion to make the exercise both ways: team and individual card sorts because the outcome of the sort vary.

Another great reason to use this technique is because you can do card sorting when you are designing a new app/site, or you are designing a new area of a app/site, or you are redesigning an app/site.

And be prepared that there are people that would love to participate but they won’t be able to think aloud and explain the actions that they make.