Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an article on it?

While card sorting is described in a few texts and a number of sites, most descriptions are brief. There is not a definitive article that describes the technique and its variants and explains the issues to watch out for. Given the number of questions posted to discussion groups, and discussions we have had at conferences, we thought it was time to get all of the issues in one place.

This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more complex sites. This article does not cover some issues such as the use of online tools, which will be covered in a future article.

Read more…….

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

1. Companies spend $20 in labour to file a document, $120 in labour to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labour to reproduce a lost document.

2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.

3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.

4. The average document photocopied 19 times.

5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.

7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).

8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.

9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.

10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

A recent study conducted by ioko for a typical NHS Trust indicated that over half the respondents found it difficult to find information and could not be sure they were using the latest version of the document. 32% indicated that they spent between 2 to 5 hours or more per week searching for information.

You do the maths !!