What is Card Sorting and How It Can Help Your Business Grow

When you are attempting to reach an audience and attract them to your brand, you need to learn what they are looking for. How else will you know what to offer them?

Very often, companies structure their content and marketing strategies based on guesses, preferences, and the company's goals. Yes, your actions should also include these, but to attract users, you need to appeal to their needs before it all. Not knowing what the target audience needs is a sure way to create bad strategies, which is not a step in the right direction.

If you want your business to grow, regardless of the industry and its size, you need to study your users. One excellent scheme for this is card sorting.

What is card sorting?

Experts at theNielsen Norman Group, leaders in research-based user experience, define this as:

‘’A method that serves to create an information architecture that matches users’ expectations’’

Card sorting is a methodology used to evaluate and/ or design information architecture. In a so-called card sorting session, the participants organize different topics into categories and groups. The name of this method comes from the use of cards. Some use traditional pieces of paper and cards, while others useonline software tools for this purpose.

In other words, card sortingis a UX method for research where the target audience or customers group individual labels on cards based on what makes sense to them. According to Maze, this can significantly improve the information architecture. By obtaining such information, you can learn how the domain knowledge of your target audience is structured.

Here is an example. Let’s say that you own a car rental business with over 50 different models for vehicles. You need to organize these into categories for the customers. They’ll want to browse and find their preferred or ideal model faster. What options do you give them?

To realize what exactly your customer needs or expects, you cannot just go broadly and add categories for a family vehicle, luxury vehicle, or executive vehicle. Do your customers know the difference between executive and luxury? If you have two options for luxury like full-size luxury and ultra-deluxe luxury, what will they click on?

Card sorting helps you make sense of how your users perceive the information and how they want it organized.

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Understanding the connection between Information Architecture and card sorting

Card sorting is basically usability testing, or at least one type of it. Very often, it’s connected with Information Architecture. In fact, the goal of implementing this method is to improve your business’ IA.

Information Architecture is a new concept, but the idea is very old. In fact, some link this to theinverted pyramidin journalism. IA refers to the way you present content and the ways it is accessed on behalf of your consumers. It comprises everything from breadcrumbs, menus, links, categories – anything that takes a user from one page to another.

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Thanks to data collected via card sorting, you can develop a better IA. Quality IA will help people who land on your pages understand what’s offered, where they are, how to get to the information they need, and what to expect.

Variations in card sorting

Before you perform this type of testing, you should know your options. There are different variations in card sorting. They involve users creating category names, facilitators that moderate each session, and options such as digital or paper tools to implement the process. The main options to consider are:

• Open vs. closed

You’ll find that open card sorting is the most frequently used by businesses. In this case, participants are free to give groups the names they prefer by using the groupings in the stack of cards. In closed card sorting, on the other hand, participants are already given ready category names, and they need to organize the cards in these categories.

Compared to open sorting, closed card sorting does not reveal the user's perception in terms of the set of topics. It evaluates how well an existing structure supports content from their perspective.

• Moderated vs. unmoderated

Moderated sorting includes the think-aloud process during the actual sorting i.e. the debrief. This step is a chance to gain insight into the rationale of users in terms of their groupings. In such card sorting, the moderator asks questions, demands further explanations, and probes for more understanding.

Unmoderated card sorting is less expensive and usually faster to implement. It involves users working individually to organize content into groups and is usually done via an online tool. This process does not include any interaction with a moderator or facilitator.

• Paper vs. digital

Paper is a more traditional form, one that has been done for many years now. The topics i.e. content is written on index cards and participants create groupings of these cards on a workspace. In most cases, users are given full flexibility to move cards around or re-shuffle them and start again. Even though this is harder to document since it has to be done manually, many users find it better to view all of their options on a big workspace instead of on a screen.

Digital card sorting is a more modern approach that uses web-based tools or software to create the cards and share them with users. Once this is done, users can drag and drop cards into different groupings. This method is much simpler to analyze and gather since the software does most of the work.

The biggest benefits of card sorting for your business

Card sorting is a great analytics method for growing your business. Turning a business more successful depends greatly on how well you know your customers. With that in mind, here are the top benefits of this method:

Inexpensive and low-tech

This option provides businesses with deeper insight into how customers perceive the information and how they’d like to access it. It’s relatively low-tech if you use software and tools, or completely tech-free if you use the traditional paper method. All this makes it inexpensive.

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Better insight on grouping and labeling

Card sorting helps you understand how to structure and organize content to make sense to your target audience. This information can be used to tweak the marketing strategy, create better website navigation, as well as be implemented in any piece of content you create such as fliers, social media content, etc.

Quick to execute

Not only is this a cheap analytics method, but it is also fast. As soon as you gather participants for your study, you can quickly yield a big amount of valuable data. Since it doesn’t require much time or effort on behalf of users, they are more likely to accept your request to join a card sorting session.

Well-established method

Card sorting is usually used for information architecture boosting. But, this method existed a long time before that. The Nielsen study mentioned above dates back to 1995, while the method isalso linked to things like prioritization, multi-level hierarchy, and story-telling.

Gives you a better understanding of the user in general

By implementing card sorting, you can get a foundation for the structure of your product or a website. But, this will also give you tons of information of value in terms of your users and their needs/ preferences. With the data collected via this method, businesses have a better understanding of how users expect their organization to be presented to them.

Conducting a card sorting session

Now that we’ve established how useful this process can be for the success of your business, here are the steps for conducting a good card sorting session:

• Choose topics/ content that you’ll place on index cards.
• Give the users the cards and ask them to organize them into groups. Give them as much time as they need.
• Allow for ‘’unsure’’ and ‘’unknown’’ options in case the participant isn’t sure where to place a card.
• Tell users that it is okay to change their minds even after they place a card.
• Once participants put cards in different groupings, ask them to name the groups they created.
• If you’re using the moderated approach, debrief the user by asking them to explain the rationale behind their decisions. Another option is to ask them to think out loud when they sort the content.
• Repeat withat least 15 participants. If possible, get more users into this testing session.

After all is said and done...

Once you’ve done all this, you already have a lot of useful information in your hands (or on your computer). Now it is time to use it. Analyze the data by checking common groups, items that are often paired together, and category themes.

Such information can help you a lot in determining which way to use to present your products and services to best appeal to the target audience. Card sorting is a cheap and fast way to gather such useful information with big potential for increasing your success.