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A Beginner’s Guide to Card Sorting in UX Design
Understanding the Basics of Card Sorting and How It Can Help Enhance Your UX
In the world of UX design, understanding the user is everything. Without the user’s perspective, it is impossible to design products that meet their needs and expectations.
One effective tool for understanding users is card sorting. Card sorting is a technique that enables designers to organize and group information in a way that reflects users’ mental models.
In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into card sorting, including what it is, why it’s important, and how to get started.
What is Card Sorting?
It’s a user research technique that involves asking users to organize and group items or concepts into categories. These items can be anything from website pages to product features to marketing messages.
Users sort the items into categories that make sense to them, which provides insight into their mental models, expectations, and priorities. Card sorting can be conducted in person, online, or using a combination of both.
Why is Card Sorting Important?
Card sorting is an essential tool for UX designers because it helps them understand how users think and organize information.
By analyzing the results of a card sort, designers can identify patterns and insights that inform the design of products, websites, and other digital experiences.
Card sorting also provides a way to test and refine existing information architectures, ensuring that they are intuitive and user-friendly.
Card Sorting Types
There are several types of card sorting, and each is used in different situations to gain an insight into the user.
Open card sorting
In open card sorting, study participants are asked to generate their own category names and arrange items based on their established system.
This approach enables researchers to gain insights into how users organize information and the terminology they use to describe different groupings.
