The Customer Experience Experts
Online Card Sorting
Online Card Sorting
Online Card Sorting is an online, activity-based evaluation that allows users to give insight into what navigation and site organization is most intuitive for them. Ideal for early in the website development process, this method helps to inform your site’s information architecture (IA) and create a site structure that best aligns with your target users’ expectations.
Methodology
For online card sorting, eVOC Insights conducts both open and closed card sorts. Recommended for generating a new IA structure, an open card sort is conducted as an individual online survey and asks users to best group together terms of key site topics, from a given list, as they see fit. Once the cards have been organized, participants are then asked to provide titles for the groups they have created.
For sites with a set number of categories, a closed card sort provides insight into the organization and efficacy of the category labels. For this survey, users are presented with the pre-established category labels and are asked to match a list of terms of key site topics into the appropriate groups.
For both methods, the results are analyzed across a representative sample of target customers to provide a diagram of how users relate content areas of your site.
Benefits
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Understand users’ mental models of how they group and relate your site content
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Determine the most intuitive site structure and information architecture for your target customers
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Identify navigation labels that resonates with users
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Gain insight from a representative sample of target customers without geographical restrictions
Questions
- How would users organize the content on a site in a way that is most intuitive for them?
- How many content categories and levels of navigation should there be?
- Are there new categories that arise that are not currently on the site?
- What hierarchy and navigation labels are best understood by customers?
- How do different user segments group the same list of terms?
Insights
While ideal for early stage site development or a redesign of an existing structure, online card sorting can also be performed at any stage of the website development process to evaluate the efficacy of a current site organization or identify key navigation usability issues. This method seeks to understand the most logical navigation structure from the customer’s perspective, thereby improving site experience by ensuring that users can efficiently locate information on your site. Without geographical restrictions, online card sorts have the added advantage of allowing a representative sample of target customers to participate and providing quantitative support for the research results.
