Card Sorting: Uncover Users' Mental Models for Better Information Architecture

Source: NNG / Nielsen Norman Group

Part of making a site easy to use is organizing information so that people find what they’re looking for. Too often, content is structured based on what makes sense to the company, not to the users. (This was the #1 usability problem in our recent study of 43 websites.) One of the primary ways to figure out an organization scheme that best matches users’ mental model is through card sorting.

Definition: Card sorting is a UX research method in which study participants group individual labels written on notecards according to criteria that make sense to them.  This method uncovers how the target audience’s domain knowledge is structured, and it serves to create an information architecture that matches users’ expectations.

Let’s imagine that you’re designing a car-rental site. Your company offers around 60 vehicle models that customers can choose from. How would you organize those vehicles into categories that people can browse to quickly find their ideal car rental? Your company might use technical terms such as family car, executive car, and full-size luxury car. But your users might have no idea of the difference between some of those categories. This is where card sorting can help: ask your users to organize vehicles into groups that make sense to them, and, then, see what patterns emerge.