[Sigia-l] card sorting by survey?

[Whitney Quesenbery]

Laura -

We've all been around the block on card sorting before, but here's my take 
on it.

I don't think you can "nail down navigation" by using card sorting. What I 
think you can use it for is:

- As an activity during a user research session to understand how the 
people who will use the web site think about the information it will 
provide access to.

- As input into your thinking about navigation and groupings of links.

- As a way of testing (using a reverse card sort) your high level 
navigation choices

This is one of the basic misunderstandings about user research, usability 
and participatory design. (IMHO), the activities are not intended to have 
users design the site --- they are a way for you to gain better insights 
into their terminology, mental models so that you can do your own design work.
Usability testing, card sorting - any technique that provides a tangible 
activity is better that asking for their opinion. What you want is to see 
what they do, not what they say they think they will do.

To your logistical question:

There are several acceptable online card sorting tools. I've used:

         EZSort (IBM) - http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/410
         WebCat (NIST) - 
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/WebCAT/overview.html
         CardZort - http://condor.depaul.edu/~jtoro/cardzort/
         WebSort -http://www.websort.net/

They all have some problems, but all basically work.  WebSort is completely 
online. CardZort has a nice open layout that lets users move things around 
fluidly and allows for both card titles and short descriptions.

If you are looking for large numbers, any of these remote tools will solve 
it. You might also use the online tools in a 1:1 session, and either go to 
your user's desk or invite them to yours, since you no longer need the 
large table to work on. That way you could get both the data and the 
benefit of the in-person session.

W.


At 04:43 PM 10/24/2003 +0100, Laura S. Quinn wrote:
>I've done some intial user interviews/ user testing, to get a sense for
>what the users do, and how the intranet's currently being used.  I've
>set a very high level direction for the redesign, and would like to move
>on to a card sort to nail down navigation.  An open card sort (with
>probably about 12- 15 users to get a resonable cross section of user
>groups) seems important for the project - the current navigation is
>crappy and the users seem to have substantially differing models of how
>it should be organized.
>
>But my management is quite resistant - they're concerned about my time
>and the logistics involved (in particular, there are enormous conference
>room issues), and suggests  trying to collect similar data through some
>kind of emailed task- perhaps an Excel spreadsheet with "cards" as a
>list of fields, with directions that they should group them into columns
>and label the groups (obviously, the clarity of the instructions would
>be very important)?


Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

UPA  - www.usabilityprofessionals.org
STC Usability SIG: www.stcsig.org/usability