What is card sorting?
Card sorting is a 10-year old technique used by designers, branding companies, & usability experts. In relation to websites, card sorting is about getting your users to help you develop your information architecture.
It involves writing the content of your website on cards and asking users to sort these cards into groups/categories. How users sort the cards reveals their “mental models” (a fancy term which refers to how users classify information in their heads).
If your website has pre-existing categories, you may want to ask participants to sort the content into these categories. This is known as “Closed Card Sorting“.
If your website has no categories, you can ask participants to group the cards then label the groups themselves. This is known as “Open Card Sorting“.
You may use either one or a mixture of both methods. It’s quite common to ask participants to sort the content into existing categories and create new labels if they find the existing ones unsuitable.