Comments on: Card sorting tools - a short summary

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.

By: Paul Trumble

Paul Trumble — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:01:04 +0000

Donna,

Your forgetting Classified, http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/classified/default.asp. I’ve used it, it’s not bad. The subjects can’t define their own categories though.