Card Sorting

The November 2006 issue of STC Intercom magazine focused on usability, and I contributed the featured article, Card Sorting: An Inexpensive and Practical Usability Technique.

If you’re designing a system to organize content, you can either come up with your own labeling system — which may or may not be shared by others — or you can talk to the actual users of the system and learn how they perceive its content. There are many methods of gathering this user data, but they can often be both time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, there’s hope: one method that is generally inexpensive, quick, and easy is card sorting.

If you’re an STC member you can download the article from Intercom Online. Alternatively, you can download the article from the new Articles & Papers section of my professional site.