[Sigia-l] card sorting by survey?

[Donna Maurer]

Whitney perfectly covered the conceptual issues surrounding card 
sorting, so I'll just raise a practical.

In my experience, when using any computer-based tool, whether it be 
Excel or one of the card sorting tools, usability problems in the tools 
get in the way of users being able to provide a good sort. People put 
their mental energy into working with the tool which leaves little 
energy for the sort (this doesn't happen with cards - practically no 
energy expended on working with paper). My experience is that doing 
this is actually worse than nothing - all you catch is surface 
characteristics for the sort ;)

My favourite quick & dirty card sorting method is to create a number 
of sets of cards, drop them at people's desks, explain the concept, 
and give them 24 hours to complete the sort. Come back next day, 
have a quick chat about their groupings and labels and pick up the 
cards. If you number the cards, you can get the data into a 
spreadsheet faster for analysis.

HTH

Donna Maurer
http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/


On 24 Oct 2003 at 16:43, Laura S. Quinn wrote:

> 
> I'm currently working on the redesign of a medium sized intranet
> (about 2000 pages and docs) for a very large publishing company, and
> could use some advice.
<snipped>
> 
> This doesn't seem obviously horrific to me.  While I'd prefer to take
> a traditional approach (primarily to hear the user's thought process),
> it seens to me that the "survey" approach might be a lot better than
> nothing.  I might also be able to set it up to automatically coallate
> the data from the spreadsheets, potentially resulting in the ability
> to collect data from a lot more people.
> 
> What do you think?  Had anyone tried this before?  Is it better than
> nothing?  Are there difficulties I'm not seeing?
> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> Laura