Old Cards, New Tricks: Applied Techniques in Card Sorting

Card sorting is an extremely useful technique in the design of interactive systems. However, it is under-used in practice – often through a lack of understanding and the complexities of cluster analysis. This half-day, hands-on tutorial uses concrete examples taken from live web sites to guide participants through the analysis, design and execution of card sorting activities, particularly as they apply to web navigation. Specific topics presented include open and closed sorting, rapid data collection using bar codes, cluster analysis and extensions to traditional analyses using quality of fit metrics and measures of deviation.