[Sigia-l] Card sorting? Why?

[Stewart Dean]

I'm going to throw this out as I really need to check that I'm not making
some dumb mistake here.

I've been an IA for a good few years now, have sat through presentations on
card sorting and still don't get why you would want the users to sort
through a series of arbitrary terms.

I have been thinking about this for a while - why base the structure of a
site upon words at all? It appears that it's usage and the areas of
information that are what we are organising, not the labels.  I see a large
amount of what I do about providing context and taking elements out of
context and rearranging them feels to me as the opposite of what I do when I
create the information architecture for a site.

In short I put card sorting in the same pile as focus groups - in that it
adds noise to the solution rather than clarity.

There are other methods as well I question but let's start with card
sorting. What am I missing here?

Stewart Dean

User Experience Person