http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Card-Sorting A listing of the most recently indexed works about Card Sorting in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Card-Sorting http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html It's easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem. http://tc.eserver.org/33137.html http://tc.eserver.org/33137.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33138.html http://tc.eserver.org/33138.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33139.html http://tc.eserver.org/33139.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33140.html http://tc.eserver.org/33140.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33141.html http://tc.eserver.org/33141.html You should now have everything ready to conduct your card sorts - cards, users, observers and most importantly a clear objective of what you want to achieve. http://tc.eserver.org/33142.html http://tc.eserver.org/33142.html In the final part of the article I talk about perhaps the most important part of the procedure - Analysis. This is the part in which you can get the most bogged down. You must be thorough, ruthless and accurate. Card sorting won’t always give you the answer - it may just give you more questions. This is where the analysis comes in. http://tc.eserver.org/33049.html http://tc.eserver.org/33049.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/32805.html http://tc.eserver.org/32805.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/32587.html http://tc.eserver.org/32587.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29270.html http://tc.eserver.org/29270.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/28585.html http://tc.eserver.org/28585.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/28271.html http://tc.eserver.org/28271.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/27603.html http://tc.eserver.org/27603.html Discusses the life cycle of Story Cards, what they should be, how to use them and what to watch out for. http://tc.eserver.org/26656.html http://tc.eserver.org/26656.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/24755.html http://tc.eserver.org/24755.html A summary of how IBM's USort/EzCalc and CardZort worked for results entry and analysis. http://tc.eserver.org/24468.html http://tc.eserver.org/24468.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/23258.html http://tc.eserver.org/23258.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/22482.html http://tc.eserver.org/22482.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/22076.html http://tc.eserver.org/22076.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21396.html http://tc.eserver.org/21396.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21279.html http://tc.eserver.org/21279.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/20676.html http://tc.eserver.org/20676.html Discusses Category Agreement Analysis, a card-sorting technique to help create usable information architectures. http://tc.eserver.org/20440.html http://tc.eserver.org/20440.html 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? http://tc.eserver.org/19928.html http://tc.eserver.org/19928.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/10630.html http://tc.eserver.org/10630.html 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.