UX card sorting: How to run a successful card sort

UX card sorting is the practice of running a card sorting session as part of UX research.

As we discussed in chapter one, card sorting is a UX research method where an individual or group of people are given information written on cards—physical or digital—and must group them into different categories in a way that feels natural to them. The goal is to understand how people understand and categorize information.

This chapter will break down the individual steps needed to conduct a successful card sort, which we’ll cover in detail in the next sections. But first, let’s look at why card sorting is so valuable.

Broadly speaking, card sorting is used to understand how your users feel about and categorize different ideas and information. There are multiple benefits to using card sorts within UX research, including how it helps you:

As with any type of research, card sorting requires some planning. In this section, we’ll go through the step-by-step process on how to run a card sorting session. using the example of Maze’s open card sorting template for some visual context.

Before delving into any card sorting sessions, it’s important to define your objectives and research goals. This includes writing down your assumptions and your stakeholders’ to know what to look for during analysis. During the sessions, keep an open mind to new perspectives and ideas from the participants, even if they contradict your assumptions.

Vaida Pakulyte, UX Researcher and Designer at Electrolux notes that “Card sorting enables you to structure your content from the user’s point of view, as opposed to your own or that of your company. So a good card sorting session will always lead you to question your assumptions.”

Carefully curate and prioritize your topic hierarchy based on your research objectives. That means identifying the topic you’ll be testing (e.g. the settings options in your app) and writing down all the ideas that need to go into that.

Vaida says “It’s important to use card sorting for the right reasons and at the right time in a project. Most importantly, a card sort should be used when you’re looking forward to really getting a deep insight into what matters to your user, and discovering how they prioritize things.”

After you select your topic, it’s time to write the ideas on the cards as words or phrases. For example, suppose you’re trying to group the information that should go into the Setting page of an app. In that case, the cards should include words that represent the different options available, such as About me, Add a credit card, Reset your password, etc.

To make it straightforward for the participants, write one concept per card and ensure the cards are in a random order to keep sorting bias in check.

If you’re running a closed card sorting session, you’ll also have to create the categories that participants will group cards into. In the example above, examples of cards could be Account information, Payment information, etc.

Make sure to include an introduction to the session that welcomes participants to the test and lets them know the goal. Here’s an example:

“Hi, welcome to our card sorting exercise. Your contribution will be used to help organize the content of our website. All you have to do is organize topics into groups as it makes sense to you.”

Finally, prepare the instructions to let participants know what they have to do to complete the exercise. When you’re using a testing tool such as Maze, these instructions are usually incorporated into the platform’s interface and displayed to participants automatically.

However, if you’re running a moderated session, you'll have to prepare these in advance. Here’s some examples of card sorting tasks:

As we saw above, there are different card sorting types—choosing the one that best fits your research project will depend on your resources, budget, and goals.

When choosing the card sorting type you want to run, you’ll have to consider whether you want to work in-person with paper card sorting, or conduct a remote session with digital card sorting. Decide between a moderated or unmoderated one, and consider whether closed card sorting, an open card sort or hybrid will suit your project better.

Determine whether you are in a generative or evaluative stage of your project. For example, if you’re looking to generate a lot of ideas, open card sorting would be best. If you’ve already done your research and need to validate your concept, closed card sorting is the way to go. If you want a mix of new ideas and confirming existing ones, hybrid card sorting is ideal.

Vaida Pakulyte, UX Researcher and Designer at Electrolux, recommends doing a dry-run before running a card-sorting test. Practicing the session with a colleague or a friend before recruiting research participants will ensure everything makes sense and iron out any potential issues.

It’s important to plan the dry-run in a way that mimics the actual card sort from the way you come up with the instructions and card phrasing to selecting a remote or in-person session. You can also run these sessions with a sample from your actual test participants. This will help you find gaps in your instructions and get real insights.

When you conduct a card sort, the participants will sort the cards into the categories that make the most sense to them. “Make sure there is enough space either digitally or physically to have all the cards visible so that people can get an overview easily,” Vaida says.

After the card sorting session ends, running follow-up interviews will help you dig deeper into the participants’ mental models and what they thought the cards and groupings represented. This will uncover useful information that will help you come up with actionable items.

Vaida suggests “Sometimes I come up with a few questions right after card sorting to ask people about the reasoning they did. Once the sorter is finished, I just take a few minutes to talk through the reasoning behind the positions that they’ve placed the cards in, and take notes. So this is more like a light interview containing a few questions.”

Once your card sort is done, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of results analysis. Whether you went with hybrid, open or closed card sorting, reviewing the results can feel daunting.

Start by taking an overall look at the results as a whole. Look at the big picture and try to find common patterns in how the actual cards have been sorted and the category names have been given by participants.

If you ran an open or hybrid card sort, it’s worth standardizing categories with similar labels (different wording, spelling, capitalizations, etc.).

In the results, does anything jump out as surprising? Are there similarities or differences between participant sorts? It’s very important to focus on the big perspective before looking at the details such as comments, wording, and quantitative data. Ultimately, this analysis will help you understand the information that will be most useful for users to see in a particular group or category.

If you conducted an in-person session, then collecting and organizing results will require a labor of love. Using a spreadsheet to track the results is typically the easiest and most efficient method. However, if you utilized online card sorting software, many of the best card sorting tools will provide you with a concise—but still detailed—report of the results. These reports save a lot of time, and can be interpreted later and shared with the necessary stakeholders.

Just as there are different research methods (such as qualitative and quantitative), there are different analysis methods. The best approaches for card sorting data are exploratory and statistical analysis.

Exploratory analysis is the sibling of qualitative research—it’s about intuition and interpretation. If you want to uncover the ‘why’ behind statistics, exploratory analysis is the route to go down. It takes time, but by going through all the data, you can get a deep understanding of ideas, patterns, and insights.

Statistical analysis marries well with quantitative research—it’s all about the numbers. This is particularly useful if you’re dealing with a large sample size or looking for overall patterns, rather than the minutiae of opinions. If you’re starting from scratch following an in-person card sort and need to organize the results, then statistical analysis is the place to begin.
While you can stick to one approach, these two approaches are complementary. Using both together will provide a well-rounded and detailed picture of the results from your card sort.

The results of your card sorting will vary depending on your research goal. A card sort evaluating an existing IA will naturally have very different results to a session that aims to get category ideas from its participants.

Some examples of the type of data UX card sorting can provide are:

When first approaching a card sort, the amount of preparation needed and time to analyze the end results can feel challenging, but if you take it one step at a time, card sorting is an excellent way to understand your users. Having the right digital companion is also invaluable. We’ll be discussing this more in chapter five, where we’ll share our top picks for card sorting tools.

That’s it for our chapter on how to run a card sorting exercise. Now, let’s put it into practice by reviewing some of the best card sorting examples we’ve seen.