What is Card Sorting? – websort.net provides online card sorting
By peter.stilgoe
What is Card Sorting?
Card sorting is a simple technique that allows you to get feedback from your users about how information should be organized. Originally, researchers wrote labels on 3 x 5 cards or sticky notes, and asked participants to sort the cards into piles that were similar. Then the participants would label each pile. Using statistics and/or “eyeballing” the results across several participants, researchers were able to create better information structures.
With WebSort, card sorting is done online. People can complete your study from anywhere in the world, and you benefit from expert analysis tools that help you make sense of the data.
What Card Sorting can do for you
Documents, web pages, features; we are always presented with more. The challenge is organizing it. Managers, employees, and customers think about information in different ways.
Using WebSort, you can conduct card sorts that will allow you to:
* construct your website intuitively
* validate the structure of your organization
* get feedback on your company’s intranet
* learn where to add new content to an existing site
* reassign tasks and roles within a team
* create actionable workflows for project management
* organize products in your e-commerce store
* prioritize features for software
Card Sorting: helping figure out your ‘best fit’ site taxonomy
By peter.stilgoe
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
More From pstilgoe
NHS Guidance: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Information Architecture
By peter.stilgoe
This guidance helps healthcare organisations apply a chosen information architecture or taxonomy within a 2007 Office system environment. Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Information Architecture describes how to plan and design an information architecture and provides step-by-step instructions showing how to configure Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 with these settings.
This guidance is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently:
- Have content stored in local drives and file shares
- Archive records manually
- Have a basic Web server with Web master-controlled publishing
- Have not yet deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007, or have recently deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 and wish to plan a portal structure and information architecture
Solution Accelerator – Scorecards
This solution accelerator acts as a template for configuring a management dashboard to track organisational metrics. It contains four example dashboards ranging from a primary care practice to a healthcare organisation’s CEO dashboard with metrics based on the healthcare targets for 2008. The solution accelerator also includes online guidance explaining how to customise a dashboard for a healthcare organisation’s needs.
This solution accelerator is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently use :
- Static paper-based documents to track performance with manually-entered performance metrics
- Static, decentralized, and highly-IT dependent reports
- Standalone spreadsheet-based analysis



October 18th, 2010
