Card sorting & site map creation
Card sorting is a great way to find out how your site visitors expect the information on your site to be structured and labelled. By organising your website around how your users think (and not around how your organisation thinks) your site visitors will be able to find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, this will:
- Increase task completion and conversion rates
- Improve the user experience
- Encourage site visitors to return again and again
Webcredible rapidly understood our complex service constraints, applying their expertise to produce powerful yet practical usability improvement recommendations.
Anthony Bowyer-Lowe, Yamaha (see more testimonials)
Card sorting usually takes place after the user research & persona creation and focus groups and before wireframe design & testing in the user-centered design process.
What is card sorting?
Why we're different
Webcredible does things slightly differently to (and much better than) our competitors:
- We know more than just usability and accessibility
- We're experts in what we do
- We're passionate about our work
- We don't have 'project managers'
- You'll enjoy working with us
- We believe in knowledge sharing so you'll learn a lot from us
Find out in more detail about why we're different.
Card sorting is reasonably quick and easy to carry out and helps identify:
- How users expect the site's content to be structured and labelled
- Missing or unnecessary content
Card sorting involves writing down the name of each piece of content from your website on to its own card and then asking participants to place cards into logical groups (they'll usually be up to 100 cards). Once they've done this, participants assign a label to each group. They can also suggest new cards for groups.
Webcredible's highly experienced consultants facilitate the card sort at all times, always encouraging participants to think aloud.
This exercise is repeated with 12-15 participants in total. Then, Webcredible will carry out expert analysis on the groups and labels from the card sorts and create an appropriate site map for your website. We would of course work with you beforehand to identify the different user groups to take part in the card sort.
Deliverables from card sorting
Webcredible will create and present to you a site map inline with user expectations. This is in the form of a hierarchical diagram depicting the pages within the site and their relationship.
We would also provide you with a list of pages to be cross-linked to each other. The card sorting analysis and subsequent site map creation will show the best possible groupings. All users are of course different and two items which don't get grouped together in the site map may still belong together in the eyes of some users. We would highlight this for all possible groupings thereby showing you recommended cross-linking.
What next?
Please contact us by phone on 0870 242 6095 or by e-mail at usability at webcredible.co.uk. We'll discuss your focus group and user research needs and requirements with no pushy sales pitch and no obligation to you.