1. Alfred Kobsa University of California, Irvine
Card Sorting
Alfred Kobsa
University of California, Irvine

2. Card sorting
Card sorting can be used to inform the design of interface / information structures by users’ mental models
Each card has one concept (which come from user studies or directly from designers)
Participants are asked to order cards hierarchically (and thereby possibly think aloud to capture their rationales)
Performed individually, or by several participants in parallel (then competition and no think-aloud)
Variants:
Category names are pre-defined (closed set or user-extensible)
Freelisting: users produce all card concepts falling under a category
Number of participants: start with 5-6, add some more, and stop when there seems convergence in the results. Otherwise add some more.
Software available (with consolidation across participants) E.g.,