Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site. It helps you organize content to better suit your users rather than presenting a reflection of your organizational structure.
This collaborative method reveals how users naturally group and categorize content, providing insights that inform navigation design and content organization decisions. Card sorting works equally well for new site planning and existing site reorganization.
Image Source: Card sorting in UX: What is it? - UX Design Institute
Ideal if you’re starting from scratch. Start with a pile of blank cards and work through the “must-have” pages or content categories before moving onto the nice-to-haves. This approach reveals natural user mental models without constraining thinking to existing structures.
Users organize topics into groups they create, then name each group based on their understanding. This method uncovers unexpected categorizations and terminology that users find intuitive.
Best for reorganizing your existing site structure or validating a proposed structure. Create a card for each of your navigational items and key pages, then arrange them to mimic your current website’s hierarchy.
Rearrange, reorder, and consolidate based on your content audit insights and brainstorming. Relabeling pages is encouraged - often the card sorting process reveals better terminology that resonates with users.
Select topics that represent your key content areas and avoid topics that contain the same words, which can create confusion during sorting. Focus on distinct content categories that users need to differentiate between.
Shuffle cards and give them to participants. Have users organize topics into groups that make sense to them without providing guidance on how many groups to create or what logic to use.
Once participants are satisfied with their groupings, have them name each group using terminology that feels natural to them. These group names often reveal the language users prefer for navigation labels.
Ask users to explain their reasoning for each group. This conversation often provides the most valuable insights, revealing mental models and assumptions that inform information architecture decisions.
In general, keep the number of people small (ideally 2-8 participants) to maintain focus and enable meaningful discussion.
For remote workshops, several whiteboarding tools make virtual card sorting effective and efficient: Miro (free), Figjam (free), and Maze (paid) all offer digital card sorting capabilities that replicate the collaborative benefits of in-person sessions.
Analyze data by looking for common groups and themes throughout your findings. Pay attention to which content items consistently get grouped together across different participants and sessions.
The use of AI can really help with identifying themes in raw data from card sorting sessions. AI tools can quickly process participant explanations and grouping rationales to surface patterns that might be missed in manual analysis. If you are in the Yale community, we recommend using Clarity, Yale’s AI platform, to help analyze qualitative feedback and identify recurring themes.
Identify terminology patterns in how participants name groups - this language often works better for navigation labels than internal organizational terms.
We strongly recommend leveraging a more visual representation of your sitemap to workshop and ideate based on card sorting results. Transform insights into proposed site structures that can be further tested and refined.
Card sorting reveals user mental models that should inform your information architecture decisions. Consider these questions: