Card Sorting for Web Design
william...@googlemail.com
design of web and intranet navigation (plus quite a few other
application areas) know that we are running one-day workshops in card
sorting in London and Edinburgh (12 and 28 May, respectively).
Full detailst at http://www.csadvances.com
Regards,
William Hudson
Syntagm Ltd
Andy Dingley
> we are running one-day workshops in card sorting
Oh how I wish I worked for an outfit that took such issues seriously
8-(
This is a very interesting topic, much overlooked (and basically
ignored) by UI designers.
Philip Herlihy
Ok - what's card sorting?
Phil, London
Andy Dingley
> Ok - what's card sorting?
You'd think that specialists in usability and UI design might remember
to highlight this for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it 8-)
Try this (deeply buried on their own site).
http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/cardsort.shtml
It's one of those practical techniques that follows a core principal
of good UI design - actually catching some measurable metrics from the
users themselves. As such, it's almost never done. Of those people
designing software for users, how many _ever_ bother to involve the
_users_? (just think for a moment about how dumb this really is).
It's also a problem to get answers from users without them being
skewed by the users' perception of what they "ought" to say.
In principle it's a way of developing a folksonomy, a user-created
taxonomy, that describes how various things are related, and how
closely they're related. If you've ever used software where you have
to continually jump from one menu to another to do commonplace tasks,
that's a system where the designers could have benefitted from card
sorting.
In practical terms, you make up decks of "cards" beforehand, where a
card relates to some feature of the system, or of the user's tasks.
Then you ask a group of users to arrange these cards into groups and
orders, according to how _they_ think about the problem. Then some
analysis of the way that users arranged things allows you to extract a
mathematical representation of the users' conceptual model of the
situation that the cards represent.
This is _not_ a focus group. A focus group has users discuss the
arrangement together, with all their prejudices, shams and
subconscious misrepresentation of themselves to their peer group. Then
they tell you what they think the answer is. It's a good way to
produce a self-deluding useless design concept. Card sorting tells you
what they think, focus tells you what they think you want to hear.
It's a prime example of the stupidity of crowds.
In a different and currently topical domain, take a group of
experienced bank managers (if they're not all dead or retired by now)
and a group of cards representing people making loan applications. Let
them sort them subjectively, then use Bayesian approaches to produce
algorithms for objectively evaluating loan quality.
One downside of card sorting is that it needs a lot of pre-printed
cards making beforehand, then it needs some pretty simple stats
running over the results. As we're geeks we can do this ourselves, or
we can buy the OP's software to do it for us. If you want to do card
sorting right now, for minimum investment and quickest returns, the
OP's product seems worth a look.
Paul Herber
<din...@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>On 29 Apr, 13:18, Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceb...@you.com> wrote:
>
>> Ok - what's card sorting?
>
>You'd think that specialists in usability and UI design might remember
>to highlight this for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it 8-)
I was wondering whether the whole site was a joke, the impenetrable
standard of English, the overuse of gobbledygook, let's see who we can
fool with some random buzz-words.
--
Regards, Paul Herber, Sandrila Ltd.
http://www.sandrila.co.uk/ http://www.pherber.com/
Philip Herlihy
A really useful and interesting answer - thanks!
Phil