Services - Usability Services - Card Sorting
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What is Card Sorting?
A
way of finding out how your customers mentally 'group' site content or
products, and the labels that they most closely associate with those groups.
Why you need it
If customers can't find information or products then they will quickly give up and leave. Although search functions can help, it's frequently slower than navigating and is often only used after frustrating failures with site hierarchy. Card sorting means you can map your content to the customers expectations, rather than making them change their mental model.
When your customers can find products faster, they buy more - average basket size for our clients frequently increase after card sorting.
What we do
Set group sessions with your customers, and provide them with cards matching selected content from your product (this can be content, products or even menu items). We facilitate the sorting and labelling of these cards, then analyse the results to provide you with a map for your data. We then present this back to your team.
In detail
The more content you add to your site, the harder it can be for customers to find what they are looking for - especially if you don't use the exact grouping and terminology that your customers are expecting. This slows them down, and they buy less - when our clients implement the results of card sorts on e-commerce sites, average basket size invariably increases. The same is true of content and menu options - the more menu options there are the harder it is for new users to locate the option they need, and the slower the software is to use.
Our card sort sessions involve from five to seven users, each with their own set of cards selected to represent the subject of the sort. They are then asked to:
- Sort all cards into logical groups (according to their own perceptions).
- Provide meaningful names for each group.
- Amalgamate smaller groups, if too many have been created.
- Separate out larger groups, if too few have been created.
The results from each user and each session are then analysed with our pattern matching software, providing a 'best fit' hierarchy and naming structure for the data that will be the most effective for your users.
Deliverables
- Two full colour copies of the card sort report, including:
- Executive summary of findings.
- Overview of methodology used and steps undertaken.
- Key findings from the evaluation.
- Proposed hierarchy for the data.
- Highlighted 'poor fit' data (items that were not consistently placed anywhere).
- Recommendations for data structure and further steps required.
If you'd like to see an example card sorting report then please contact us.
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