Card+Sort

"Card-sorting" is one of the "Ask" techniques of IDEO's Method Cards. Participants name possible features, functions or design attributes of a device or system on separate cards, then they organize the cards spatially in ways that make sense to them. Engaging in this technique helps to expose people's mental models of a device or system, and their organization reveals expectations and priorities about the intended functions of the device or system.
 * [[image:card-sorting.PNG]] || ==What it is==

IDEO used the card-sorting technique with a group of end users to help design the final menu structure and naming for a new digital phone service.

The term card sorting applies to a wide variety of activities involving the grouping and/or naming of objects or concepts. These may be represented on physical cards; virtual cards on computer screens; or photos in either physical or computer form. Occasionally, objects themselves may be sorted. The results can be expressed in a number of ways, with the primary focus being which items were most frequently grouped together by participants and the names given to the resulting categories. For the purpose of interaction design, the sorting process — usually performed by potential users of an interactive solution — provides:* Terminology (what people call things)
 * Relationships (proximity, similarity)
 * Categories (groups and their names)

This information is used to decide which items should be grouped together in displays; how menu contents should be organized and labelled; and what words we should employ to describe the objects of our users' attention. == ====Benefits== For interaction design, customer research or research in the social sciences, few investigative techniques are as effective as card sorting in dealing with large numbers of concepts. In face-to-face settings, handling and annotating physical cards is a fairly natural and unintimidating process: observing users engaged in this process can result in many insights for researchers and provide a fertile source of questions and conversations about the problem domain being studied and, of course, users themselves. These outcomes and opportunities are hard to obtain through interviews, questionnaires and usability evaluations, although each of these alternatives has its strengths for more limited scopes of investigation. For example, it is relatively easy to discover that a single menu item is mislabelled in a usability study, but prohibitively expensive for several dozen items. || See also: [] for remote card sorting online and [] for Microsoft Word templates for card sorting.