Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Stephen Ng

Card sorting is a quick and simple activity that gives you valuable insights with regards to your users and how they understand content on your website.

These are the 5 easy steps I use to facilitate ‘card sorting’ workshops with my clients.

Things you will need…

Sticky notes
Marker
Cards with labels printed on it
Flags or colour dotted stickers
A phone to take pictures of the end results

You can set up your table the same way I set up mine as per my photo above. I usually organise my activity at a spot where there is a high flow of people walking past so that I can engage more users within the organisation and get them to participate in the activity.

Deciding what to write on the cards can be quite tricky. The labels should be short enough for your participants to read quickly, but long enough for them to make sense of what is being represented.

Before I start the session, I give a short introduction about the product and inform participants that this is a 5-step activity that will take 15 minutes.

Step 1: Organise cards into groups

The first step is to get your users to organise the cards on the table into groups. If you are doing ‘closed card’ sorting, you can specify the number of groups by placing a specific number of sticky notes on the table and getting your participants to create groups below each sticky note. Each sticky note represents a group.

Step 2: Give each group a label

Get your participants to give each group a label by writing the label on the sticky note.

Step 3: Sort groups from left to right

In this step, participants will sort groups in descending order based on their respective importance, from the most important group on the left to the least important group on the right.

Step 4: Sort cards from top to bottom

This step is similar to the previous step. However, participants sort cards in each group in descending order based on their respective importance, from the most important card at the top to the least important card at the bottom.

Step 5: Place flags beside cards

The last step is to give each user 5 flags, which are placed beside cards that are important to them.

To end the activity, give each participant some time to show and tell the rest of their thought process when they are sorting the cards.

Remember to take a picture of each participant’s card sort at the end of each session so that you can analyse the results before you reset the table for the next group of participants.

Overview of the entire process

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Card sort in 5 simple steps was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Card sort in 5 simple steps

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles