Card sorting

Similar to the affinity diagram process, the card sorting method tries to find the relationships that the participants find between a set of topics. It will help us improve the findability in our web or app solutions.

We can distinguish three versions of this method: open, closed, and reverse, also known as Tree Testing. We will talk about the two first here, and we will look at Tree Testing later in the chapter. Both the open and closed versions consist of participants arranging a set of cards--each representing a different concept--into groups. The main difference between the open and closed versions is that in the open version, the participants name the groups after grouping the cards while in the closed version, the participants have the cards and groups names from the beginning.

This kind of method can be helpful in organizing the content of your application into a small set of sections. Imagine that you are creating a music application, and you want to introduce various functionalities, but you do not know how to group them in a logical way. Using this method, you can have a set of elements to sort, such as these:

Get recommendations, find old groups, publish your own music, see what others are listening to, listen to music in the car playlists, send music through bluetooth, choose audio quality, artists, and albums and create groups for the user to arrange them into, such as discover music, my library, create, listen, and settings.