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Book Review: Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer
Donna Spencer tells you all you need to know about the low-tech but effective technique of card sorting, a tool that should be in every content strategist’s toolbox. If you’ve never run a card sort this book will get you started, and even if you have a long experience with 3×5s, Donna will probably be able to teach you a trick or two to help you better coax your recalcitrant content into an appropriate category.
“How could I be sure that the categories that made sense to me would also make sense to someone else?” asks Donna Spencer at the beginning of this slim, readable volume. “Whatever I came up with, I’d have to be able to back it up.” Card sorting is presented as a simple but effective mechanism for ensuring that the organization of content is not merely logical but useable`and for providing empirical support for your solution. And though the focus remains on the little 3“x 5” index cards that you buy at the stationary store (and their software equivalents), we also learn about the difficulties inherent in trying to organize information into categories that users will understand and the possibilities and limitations of statistical analysis of the results of a card sort.
The book deals primarily with producing categories for organizing website or other system content by having users sort cards (representing subject areas or actual content items) into categories that they define (open sort) or that are provided to them (closed sort). There are discussions of the merits of open and closed and team and individual sorts, along with a brief survey of the software available for the sort itself and subsequent statistical analyses.
Donna takes us through the lifecycle of a card sort from the (often neglected) definition of the goal of the exercise, through selection of the content and participants, to the sort itself and the analysis of the results. She provides many practical tips gleaned from her long experience of card sorts but is careful also to emphasize their limitations and to show how this is one of many techniques that should be employed together to produce user-centered information architectures.
For me, the most useful material dealt with the preparation for the sort and the emphasis on listening to and recording participants’ discussions. Listening is important as it helps you to understand how people arrive at their final categories and what were the most difficult items to place – information that isn’t available from the baseline data of which card ended up in which pile. Also intriguing was the idea of running a second, task-based sort to test how the categories defined through the analysis of content would serve users when they have to find specific information.
Donna provides guidance on the optimal number of participants, content items, and categories, along with a pro forma invitation and introductory script for a card sort, and access to the Excel spreadsheet that she uses for exploratory analysis. Filled with common sense advice and interesting case studies, the book can serve as a primer for card sorting and content strategy novices and as a refresher course for those already versed in the tools of information architecture.
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