Card Sorting Doesn’t Cut the Custard
Posted: August 14th, 2009 | Author: Zef | Filed under: Information Architecture, Websites | 5 Comments »
Where's the custard in your supermarket?
Why I don’t use Card Sorting
Card sorting is a simple technique in User Experience Design where a group of users are guided to arrange subject-headings under pre-determined categories or into groups which make sense to them.
For example, a card labelled “apples” might logically sit under a category labelled “fruit”.
It can be a useful approach for designing menu structures or website navigation paths.
But I haven’t used card-sorting since 1999.
Why? Because since the advent of the Content Management System (CMS) I haven’t needed to. The CMS changed the way I approached information architecture forever. I’ve never again needed to resort to card sorting in order to locate content in a place which is intuitive for ‘most users’.
In my view card sorting is a bit of a hack to resolve the issue of static websites where the content is forced to live in one place.
It’s like going to the supermarket and looking for custard powder. To me it makes sense to look for it within the cooking section next to sugar, baking powder, cornflour etc. But good luck finding it there because you’ll usually find it in the desserts section next to jelly and ice-cream cones.
