Redesigning the structure of SumUp support centre with card sorting
We recently started an overhaul of our Support Centre, the go-to resource for new and existing SumUp business owners, for everything from setting up accounts to using all of the products’ features to drive their business. SumUp has grown quite a bit over the last few years, but the support centre has not quite scaled to meet the growing needs of our new and existing users.
🛫 Kicking off the Project
One of the common issues when designing a content-heavy project is the categorisation of the content. Along with the use of UX methods such as usability testing and diary studies to identify potential design changes and improvements, we used card sorting specifically to help categorise support articles and build a better information structure. There are two types of card sorting in general but we’ll focus on one for now.
How does card sorting help?
- The research method provides insight into users’ psyche when designing intuitive content structure.
- The result will provide us with a foundation for the information structure when exploring and assessing different approaches.
🔍 The Testing Session
We reached out to the users who contacted Customer Support in the last few months and invited them to a card sorting session to help us improve our support centre. We wrote one article title on each card and we brought the cards (50 in total) to the testing session.
Open Card Sorting
👨💼1 x facilitator 👩💻1 x note taker 🥰1 x participant
To prep for each session, the facilitator must ensure that the cards are in a random order to guard against sorting bias. After being introduced to the purpose of the session, the participant groups the cards together in any way they see fit, before labeling these groups. At the end of the session, we encourage participants to add concepts that are missing. Open card sorting works well for generative / exploratory phases.
We found that participants were struggling to classify a card sometimes because some cards might belong in more than one group.
🔬 Analysing the result
Categories Pattern
After the testing sessions, we created a participants table to allow us to have an overall look at the results and review each individual card sort. We looked for common patterns in how the cards had been grouped and the group names given by participants.
Standardising Categories
As in open sorts, participants were able to name their categories themselves. We found that multiple participants had created similar category names. We were then able to standardise categories by merging similar categories together.
📏 Evaluating with Closed Card Sort
Once we had established the first structure from the results of the open card sort, we used another method — closed card sorting — to test out if the categories were intuitive to our participants.
Close Card Sorting
👨💼1 x facilitator 👩💻1 x note taker 🥰1 x participant
We gave participants the same 50 cards with article title written on top. But they were asked to put each card into pre-defined categories. At the end of the session, we asked if they’d expect any differences in terms of the title of each group and to suggest missing terms or categories. This method helped us assess and iterate the structure before moving forward in the design process.
We’ll discuss other UX methods we’re using in the coming posts
This is one of the series of posts about redesigning SumUp support centre as the result from card sorting only captures a small part of the redesign. We’re also using other UX methods in the design process, which we’ll discuss in the coming posts. Thanks for reading 👀
Special thanks to Carolina for sharing her knowledge of research methods.🙏 Feel free to let us know your thoughts and your approach when designing content-heavy projects.
