Card Sorting
Posted: March 27th, 2015In order to develop an information architecture that is meaningful to users, one of the tried and true usability techniques is called card sorting. There are two main types of card sorting: open and closed. In open card sorting, users are given cards with terms from the website and asked to collect these terms in logical groups. They are then asked to label each of the groups with an overall label that identifies the group. In closed card sorting, users are given a predetermined set of groups labels and asked to place each of the cards into one of these categories. In each case, users are given the chance to put aside cards that are not clearly understood or do not logically belong, in their opinion.
What We Did
One of our primary goals is to ensure that the terms used on our top level navigation (currently, the yellow horizontal navigation bar) are meaningful to our users. For this reason, we performed an open card sort in order to analyze whether the terms chosen by our users reflect what we currently use and where we might be better off choosing new terminology.
As the school year is quickly drawing to and end and we know that undergraduate students will soon be busy prepping for exams, we felt that we should perform card sorting for our undergrad users now.
The Web Support team worked together to produce a set of 50 cards that cover the main categories of content on our website at a very broad level (what is sometimes called second-level navigation). We then printed these 50 terms on cards, and ran a few initial trial tests with some of our Library staff.
On Wednesday March 18th from 9:30 am until noon we set up a table in the Stauffer Library Loggia and looked for volunteer undergrads to complete the sorting. As sessions did take between 10-20 minutes in general, we offered volunteers Queen’s University reusable coffee cups for their time. We were able to test a total of 10 students, with three sets of students working in pairs (for a total of 7 complete sessions).
The Results
From these 7 sessions, we collected the results in a spreadsheet and then listed each of the 50 terms with all the different ways our undergrads chose to group these terms. We identified keywords from each collection of grouping labels and listed these with a count. What was quite encouraging was that 49/50 terms had a least 2 common keywords, with some having 5 or 6 common keywords. Also encouraging was the fact that many of the grouping labels chosen were very close to if not exactly the same as the currently-used terminology.
Next Steps
We plan to complete the same test with our graduate student and faculty users in the next few weeks. After that we will make the complete results available. These results will assist us in our next phase of designing a prototype top-level navigation and proceeding with further testing such as closed card sorting and task-based tree testing.
Featured Resource
The Accessibility Hub is a central online resource for accessibility at Queen’s. It will serve to elevate inclusion and improve access for everyone on our campus. The Accessibility Hub will not only provide support and feedback concerning accessibility initiatives, it will also serve as an online community for those seeking information on disability and accessibility issues on campus, and assist the university in meeting its obligations under the AODA.
As accessibility is a keystone of the website redesign, we often refer to this excellent resource. We particularly refer to The Web Standards and Accessibility Development Guide.
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