Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

Product Description

Card sorting helps us understand how people think about content and categories. Armed with this knowledge, we can group information so that people can better find and understand it. In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project.

Review

Card Sorting is a great book if you are interested in running a card sort on your next project but you’re hesitant either because you re unfamiliar or have had a bad experience with card sorting in the past. It really is a fail-proof recipe. –The Designer’s Review of Books

If you are a user experience or information management professional and just want to learn or improve your card sorting, then this book is a must have for your bookshelf. –Gary Barber, Man With No Blog

Card Sorting should prove to be an ideal book for new practitioners—or those new to the card sort—as the organization of the material begins with some basic theory, and works its way through an entire card sort. The narrative-based examples, supplemented by illustrative photos and spreadsheets, are clear and easy-to-follow. For example, the chapter on choosing between an open or closed card sort shows some of the more common software interfaces, populated with typical card sort content. Also, each chapter ends with a Summary/Tips section that captures its highlights, reminding readers of the salient points. –STC UUX Newsletter

If you are a user experience or information management professional and just want to learn or improve your card sorting, then this book is a must have for your bookshelf. –Gary Barber, Man With No Blog

Card Sorting should prove to be an ideal book for new practitioners—or those new to the card sort—as the organization of the material begins with some basic theory, and works its way through an entire card sort. The narrative-based examples, supplemented by illustrative photos and spreadsheets, are clear and easy-to-follow. For example, the chapter on choosing between an open or closed card sort shows some of the more common software interfaces, populated with typical card sort content. Also, each chapter ends with a Summary/Tips section that captures its highlights, reminding readers of the salient points. –STC UUX Newsletter

About the Author

Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect, interaction designer, and writer. That means she is responsible for what you see on the computer screen—website navigation, applications, forms, categories, and words. She works mostly on large, messy projects like government websites and intranets, internal business applications, and web applications. But sometimes she gets to work on funky, small projects and likes them just as much. Some of her projects take months to do, and sometimes she works with agile programming teams to do small amounts of work in short bursts. One of the most important parts of her work is to get a good understanding of the needs of the users and make sure the system she’s working on is as usable as possible. Given that she’s quite fond of people, she loves doing user research and running usability tests to understand the people she’s designing for. She also sketches screens, draws wireframes, and makes prototypes. But Donna likes something even more than designing usable systems. She loves teaching. She’s a very experienced speaker and regularly teaches workshops at conferences and in-house. She also presents at local and international conferences on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the Web, writing, and more.