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Research Users
Published in Brian Still, Kate Crane, Fundamentals of User-Centered Design, 2017
Card sorting is used to see how users would group or categorize information. This information is useful when determining the information architecture of your product, such as the organization of a website. Card sorting can tell the designer where users would expect to find information by having them sort ideas, concepts, or statements into groups.
Towards Citizen Science-Inspired Learning Activities: The Co-design of an Exploration Tool for Teachers Following a Human-Centred Design Approach
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2023
Miriam Calvera-Isabal, Patricia Santos, Davinia Hernández-Leo
Card sorting is a user-centred method used to implement designs according to users’ criteria. In this approach, participants have to group the cards provided, which allows researchers to find patterns (Rodil et al., 2013; Sherwin, 2018). This study was designed to identify what functionalities final users want to include in the tool and how (i.e., in which category). It has been used in many fields in the past, such as web design or TEL design (Fincher & Tenenberg, 2005; Jost & Divitini, 2021). During the card-sorting process, users are asked to categorise the cards into pre-existing categories (closed sorting) or freely into self-defined categories (open sorting) (Wood & Wood, 2008). Once data is classified, similarities and differences between clusters or pairs must be determined to obtain both qualitative and quantitative results.
Information Architecture: Using Best Merge Method, Category Validity, and Multidimensional Scaling for Open Card Sort Data Analysis
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2022
Sione Paea, Christos Katsanos, Gabiriele Bulivou
Card sorting is an important method in HCI research and practices for designing or evaluating information architectures (IAs) (Rosenfeld et al., 2002; Spencer, 2009). The IA of an interactive system describes the way its content is organized and labeled. A common assumption is that navigation structures are most efficient when content is organized congruent with the common user’s mental model of the domain at hand. Card sorting is a widely used method to elicit such mental models and therefore usability designers commonly use it in the process of creating navigation structures (Katsanos et al., 2014; Puerta Melguizo et al., 2012; Schmettow & Sommer, 2016).
A Supporting Tool for Enhancing User’s Mental Model Elicitation and Decision-Making in User Experience Research
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2023
Card Sorting was initially used by psychologists (Wood & Wood, 2008) to study models and mental categorizations of their patients. Specifically, it appeared together with the Q methodology thanks to the physicist/psychologist William Stephenson around 1953 (Doubleday, 2013). Later on, it was used in the software domain, introduced in different books by experts such as Donna Spencer (Spencer, 2009) or Jacob Nielsen (Nielsen, 2004), who described its multiple variants and benefits for design and content categorization. In a nutshell, Card Sorting consists of sorting cards labeled with meaningful terms and words into different categories. Card Sorting became popular to analyze information architecture of web applications, exploited by experts such as Rosenfeld and Morville (Rosenfeld et al., 2015), where three different variations coexist: open, closed, and hybrid Card Sorting. Open Card Sorting is mainly used at the beginning of a project, allowing participants to create their own categories and terminology to group contents. By contrast, in a Closed Card Sorting, the designer or evaluator provides the categories, and it is more beneficial to validate an existing set of categories and terms (Chaparro & Hinkle, 2008). Those variations provide different kinds of feedback in user research, being the hybrid approach advantageous when the information is partially incomplete, giving the user the freedom to create categories or select those created by the evaluator. In addition, the Delphi method can also be applied to Card Sorting. In this case, participants receive data and comments on results obtained from other participants (Doubleday, 2013), providing a different behavior and thus obtaining additional feedback in user research. As it can be seen, each of these variants can be useful in different phases of the development process, depending on the needs of both researchers and designers.