Card Sorting

Card sorting is an important yet often overlooked simple technique for the creation of an information architecture (the structure of a web site). Each card represents a page of the site and users are asked to sort the cards into groups. A typical card sorting exercise has tens of cards (usually between 20 and 60). While this technique can also be conducted using online tools, the advantage of the physical sort is the ability to extract more insights about the resulting categories. As variation of this technique – called the Reverse Sort – can also be used for the validation of an existing information architecture.