[Sigia-l] Card sorting

[Jared M. Spool]

At 10:35 PM 4/25/2006, Malahat Hosseini wrote:
>How can you make sure that the way people "sort " things is going to be the
>same as how they will be "looking " for things?

A better way to think about it is asking the question, "Is the way people 
*sort* also the way people *think* about the info's organization?"

In my experience using card sorts, I find that you can look for consistency 
across the results from multiple users. So, if multiple users put things 
under similar categories, you can start to infer that this categorization 
is how people, in general, might think of the organization.

Remember, with any method, you can't eliminate bias. You can only identify 
it and try to understand it's contribution to your inferences. If you 
suspect a bias that may drive you away from the right design, the trick is 
to try multiple approaches which would unlikely contain the same bias.

For example, instead of using the cards with your names on them, you might 
actually put pictures or snippets of the actual content right on the cards 
and have users sort those. This might remove any bias from your content 
naming approach. Alternatively, you could try a different approach, like 
Category Agreement Analysis: http://www.uie.com/articles/caa/

Jared


Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
978 327-5561   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks