Card sorting is a user-centered design method for increasing a system's usability/findability. The process involves sorting a series of cards, each labeled with a piece of content or functionality, into groups that make sense to users/participants.
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Affinity diagramming is a categorization method where users sort various concepts into several categories. This method is used by a team to organize a large amount of data according to the natural relationships between the items.
IAwiki. Articles>Information Design>Charts and Graphs>Card Sorting
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Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template
This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable to any set of cards and categories.
Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Beyond Story Cards: Agile Requirements Collaboration
Discusses the life cycle of Story Cards, what they should be, how to use them and what to watch out for.
Shore, James. JamesShore.com (2006). Articles>Documentation>Agile>Card Sorting
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The CAA: A Wicked Good Design Technique
Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Strategy>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting Tools: Final Summary
A summary of how IBM's USort/EzCalc and CardZort worked for results entry and analysis.
Maurer, Donna. DonnaM (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting: A Definitive Guide
Card sorting is a simple user-centered technique for obtaining insight into the structure of a site. But is it really so simple? This definitive guide to card sorting includes detailed instructions on how to execute and analyze a sort, plus helpful hints to improve your sorts. It is the first in a series of articles about card sorting.
Maurer, Donna and Todd Warfel. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting: An Inexpensive and Practical Usability Technique 
Card sorting is often inexpensive, quick, and easy. Learn when to use this method and how to perform a card sort of your own within your company.
Kaufman, Joshua. Intercom (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test
Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but you should still use three times more participants than you would in traditional usability tests.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned
Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I've learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.
Ng, Sam. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card-Based Classification Evaluation
We hear and talk a lot about card sorting in various forms, and how it can be used as input on a hierarchy or classification system (or a taxonomy, if you like more technical words). We hear that we should test our hierarchies, but we don’t talk about how.
Maurer, Donna. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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The EZSort tool helps interface designers organize information based on users' expectations using statistical cluster analysis. This tool includes two packages -- USort and EZCalc. The USort program can be used by card sort participants to sort virtual cards with a simple GUI interface, instead of using physical cards. It can also be used by study administrators to generate card list and enter existing card sort result from individual participants. Once individual card sort results are captured by the USort package, test administrators can use the EZCalc package to manage card sort data from multiple participants, and perform cluster analyses. EZCalc generates tree diagrams that allow direct adjustment of the cluster thresholds. The packages can be used in designing Web sites, program interfaces, and many other information design applications.
IBM (1999). Resources>Software>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
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Global Online Card Sort for World Usability Day 2006
World Usability Day has come and gone for 2006, and the results of the global online card sort are in. About five hundred people in 19 or 20 countries participated in the exercise. Find out what's next.
Bailie, Rahel Anne. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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You have collected the pieces you would like to include in your portfolio. You have sorted through your collection and selected your best work. You have made entry cards for each piece to provide a good introduction for each sample. And you are ready to place your work, introduction page, entry cards, section dividers, and give-aways into your new leather portfolio. Where do you start?
Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson. Careers>Portfolios>Information Design>Card Sorting
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Information Design Using Card Sorting
At the beginning of any information design exercise, it is normal to be confronted by a very long list of potential subjects to include. The challenge is to organise this information in a way that is useful and meaningful for the users of the system. A card sorting session can go a long way towards resolving this problem.
Robertson, James. Step Two (2001). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Creating a product that has a logical information structure is critical to the success of the product. A good structure helps users find information and accomplish their tasks with ease. Card sorting is one method that can help us understand how users think the information and navigation should be within a product.
Dick, David J. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Card Sorting
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Pluralistic Usability Walkthrough
A usability test method employed to generate early design evaluation by assigning a group of users a series of paper-based tasks that represent the proposed product interface and including participation from developers of that interface.
Usability Body of Knowledge. Resources>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Sorting Techniques for User-Centered Information Design 
Card, or pile, sorting has long been used in social sciences to identify how humans group words or concepts together. Can such sorting also inform information design? Can we use it to better anticipate what users are looking for when they open a book, a Help system, a library catalog, or a Web site? A review of literature and a variety of published case studies suggests how various sorting techniques are suited to different research goals. How to carry out a sorting study is discussed, and analysis methods applicable to the goals for an information design project are reviewed. We look at automation tools as a means of reducing analysis tedium, and as a means to expand a potential study audience via remote participation.
Deaton, Mary M. Techne (2003). Design>User Centered Design>Methods>Card Sorting
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The Web Category Analysis Tool (WebCAT) is a variation on traditional card sorting techniques that allows a web designer/usability engineer to test a proposed or existing categorization scheme of a website to determine how well the categories and items are understood by users.
NIST. Articles>User Centered Design>Information Design>Card Sorting
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Extending Card-Sorting Techniques to Inform the Design of Web Site Hierarchies
Card sorting offers a systematic and statistically significant process for answering questions about hierarchy design. However, those of us who have run card sorts know there is an art to conducting successful card sort studies, and there are many variables that can affect the usefulness of results. In this column, I’ll discuss the challenges and limitations of card sorting and review alternative and complementary techniques that designers can leverage when developing an information hierarchy for a large-scale Web site.
Hawley, Michael. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Card Sorting
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Card-Sorting: What You Need to Know About Analyzing and Interpreting Card Sorting Results
This article provides general guidelines for card sorting analysis and interpretation. Tips include how to deal with dual group membership, individual differences, effects of semantic clustering, and items in a miscellaneous group.
Hinkle, Veronica. Usability News (2008). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
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Card Sorting for Intranet Information Architecture
A relatively large navigation list (about 50 content areas) of ‘un-substructured’ finance related material. The intranet in question uses single menu pages for each of 8 main information groups and the above list was part of the wider finance information group. Some work had already be done on other subsections (i.e purchasing). But the rest of the content, which included policies, procedures and other reference material, was all in the same sub-section. The list was structured by alphabetical order only.
Besseling, Nick. Contextia (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Card Sorting
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This is a method for discovering the latent structure in an unsorted list of statements or ideas. The investigator writes each statement on a small index card and requests six or more informants to sort these cards into groups or clusters, working on their own. The results of the individual sorts are then combined and if necessary analysed statistically.
UsabilityNet (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting
#33138
This is a simple technique that enables one person or a group of people to create a categorisation of objects so that it is understood which objects belong with which other objects. Objects can be anything: menu items, blocks of content, proposed web pages, URLs. This method can be used by practically anybody after a few minutes practice.
European MultiMedia Usability Services (1999). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
#33139
Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items.
Gaffney, Gerry. Information and Design (2006). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
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Card sorting is a user testing method for organising data into structure. There’s a lot of information about on what they are, how to conduct them. Problem is, they’re all over the place and mostly they’re written by scientists so tend to be a little difficult to grasp and bogged down in analysis (which can take over your life if you let it!) I’ve decided to document my understanding of how to plan, conduct and analyse a card sort, from a practitioners point of view.
Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Card Sorting
