Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer

Author:Donna Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Published: 2009-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

We did card sorts with the client team and again with target users. Comparing the two results was interesting, and helped to sell the design process. However, since the client team was also a major audience, it highlighted compromises we would need to make.

—Austin Govella (thinkingandmaking.com)

Organizing Participants into Teams

If you are planning on running a team-based card sort, try to involve people who know each other—that way, the team doesn’t have to figure out who’s who and how to work together. But be careful about the relationship of the people in the team. If you include managers and staff in the same team, staff will usually defer to the manager. Also, IT people are often intimidating to non-IT people.

Of course, it’s not always possible to arrange teams into people who know each other. If your participants don’t know each other, plan an icebreaker activity, some discussion of the product, or a practice sort before the main activity. This tactic allows the team to meet and set the group dynamic before attempting the main activity.

In my experience, the ideal team size is three. Three people work well together, can listen to each other, and can physically fit around a table to shuffle cards around. Four or five people can work successfully, but I’ve noticed that one or two of them tend to stand back and let the others do the work.

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