Comments on: Card sorting tools – a short summary

By: maadonna

maadonna — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:57:10 +0000

Hi Laura – that’s easy. None of them

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:03:30 +0000

Hey Donna
I’m looking for a card sorting tool that allows participants to place the same card in more than one category…can you help me out?

By: Donna Spencer

Donna Spencer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:28:01 +0000

Thanks Cheryl. I know the Optimal folks had that on a todo list, but haven’t talked to them for a while about things like that. I can’t recall seeing it in any of the other tools.

By: Cheryl Marks

Cheryl Marks — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:20:17 +0000

I have been using OptimalSort with some success. One of my complaints is that it only provides for general comments. Participants can not make a comment about an individual card or group. I “thought” I read that one of the online card sorting services included that capability. Do you know of it?
Meanwhile, I’m eternally grateful for the wonderful articles you’ve written to guide me in my quest in understanding our users!

By: Aapo Puskala

Aapo Puskala — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:48:32 +0000

OptimalSort lacks in analysis tools. This is why I wrote a free on-line tool to analyze OptimalSort results. Please take a look at http://www.userpoint.fi/card_sort_cluster_analysis_tool/ (there is a sample file to try it with).

I’m planning on including a downloadable result PDF, better output format and clarity, and support for all major card sorting tools. If you have sample files which you would like to have supported, please send them to me (you’ll find my email in the URL above).

By: Donna Spencer

Donna Spencer — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:30:39 +0000

Shannan – you definitely should check out Optimal Sort (http://www.optimalsort.com/). It is terrific.

By: Shannan

Shannan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:50:46 +0000

Can anyone tell me what software program that they currently using for card sorting that is free and user-friendly. Donna listed 7 card sorting programs, but then follows by saying “a bit of a disaster all round”. It has been 4 years since this study was done. Can anyone help.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:21:59 +0000

Imagine wanting to do a card sorting exercise, except all of your users are on mine sites, the closest of which are 10 hours away, require 1-2 days induction to even enter the site and there is no facility nearby that is off-site, and there’s only an average of two people on any given site.

Traditional card sorting is simply not an option.

By: Donna Maurer

Donna Maurer — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:48:21 +0000

Hmmm…magic software to take the results from the cards to the cluster tool. Don’t know about that.

I tag each of my cards with number or letter, then use that to make it a bit easier to enter into the software – it is easier to read a letter than the whole title.

By: Divya

Divya — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 19:59:37 +0000

I am planning on doing a card sort with over 100 cards. I will be using physical cards. Cluster analysis seems to be the best way to analyse the data and I know there are statistical softwares to help do that. What I dont understand is how to get the data in the format so I can feed it to a stat software. Do you know any resources for this?

By: Mark Thristan

Mark Thristan — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:24:10 +0000

In my experience this is generally the case with most user-focused techniques – some value is gained from from the exercise itself whether affinity diagramming, card-sorting, or content prioritisation, but a great deal of additional value comes from user comments or discussions while the exercises are being run. As an additional point, I tend to mix lo-fi and hi-tech approaches – as it is true that the tactile nature of file cards can get users more engaged in the activity, but feeding the results into a clustering engine can save a deal of time in analysing the results.

By: Donna Maurer

Donna Maurer — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 11:30:47 +0000

Small Paul – I’ve been saying that for a long while. I sometimes just like to go back and check that I’m not missing something. I don’t think I’ll be changing my low-fi method for a while yet

By: Small Paul

Small Paul — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 12:13:11 +0000

Would you ever be interested in using a computer-based card sorting tool? I thought perhaps the nice simplicity of just getting a bunch of cards would be worth more than any value you’d get from computerising.

Especially as I’ve heard it stated (http://www.boxofchocolates.ca/archives/2004/10/11/understanding-how-users-see-your-blog) that you get more from listening to users doing the sorting, and thus getting more insight into how they think, than their eventual groupings.

By: Mark Thristan

Mark Thristan — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:23:53 +0000

I have used Jorge Toro’s Card Zort in the past, and got decent results out of it – but you’re right, it does have a couple of drawbacks in terms of titling cards – go over the 20 chars limit and you can’t see the grouping results properly. A while back I also suggested to Jorge that he might want to run word frequency analysis on card groupings – hasn’t happened yet, but would make the tool more useful.

By: Donna Maurer

Donna Maurer — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 00:20:31 +0000

Thanks Paul, but I didn’t really think of this as a card sorting tool. I’ve added a summary to the list of tools.