Card Sorting Definition

Card Sorting – is a fast, cheap, and reliable way of structuring the site. With the method of Sort map, you can make a common information structure of your site. It will also provide recommendations referring to the design of navigations, menus, and possible ways of information division into groups. That is, it is a division or sorting of a set of cards into the groups understandable for the participating user. Every card has written the name of the specific material of the site or its function.

Card sorting will steer you towards a likely structure, not the final structure, and it will help you to find answers to the questions, which you are going to face in the later phases of designing. For instance, a user will have a possibility to state that some information at some sections is grouped wrongly, or that some terms used at the site sound in an improper way.

The tasks of users are not taken into account – the only focus is on materials. As such, a structure applied without any consideration of the type of the tasks which the users have to handle may therefore render such later-time structure to be inflexible and of poor output.