[Sigia-l] Card sorting

[Fred Beecher]

On 4/25/06, Malahat Hosseini <mhosseini at sfu.ca> wrote:
> I have a question:
>
> 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?

Well, as Donna said, you can't. : ) But what you can do is be smart
about it (again, as Donna said) and try to tease out the pattern from
your observations of why users are sorting into the categories they
are. Once you've found the pattern and created an IA around it, you
can do a reverse card sort with users to validate (or invalidate) your
pattern.

In a reverse card sort, you have the top-level categories and some
example content/tasks. You then ask the users to match the
content/tasks to the categories. The only problem I find with this
technique is that it is somewhat more awkward to have users think
aloud as they do this. It's a simple exercise that most Americans (and
likely people from many other nations, but I'm only from one, so...)
recognize from elementary school, so people tend to think it's silly
to talk about what they're doing.

Of course, in reality, most people just use Google to look for things. : )

- Fred