Card Sorting: designing usable categories • 1. Optimal Workshop and Rosenfeld Media bring you a free sample chapter from: Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer ENJOYED THIS CHAPTER? Get the whole book for free when you purchase any OptimalSort subscription.

Review by Matthew Sanders. Donna Spencer’s debut Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories distills several years experience applying card sorting techniques to web. Click to read more about Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer. LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers All about Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer.

A-hg570 Driver. Donna Spencer prepares you to run card sorts with your team. You’ll learn to analyze the results and apply the outcomes effectively to build more usable websites.

Buy a copy of the book from Rosenfeld Media with a 30% discount using this code: optimal Optimal Workshop • Chapter 9 Use Exploratory Analysis Goals and Exploratory Analysis 110 Preparing for Exploratory Analysis 112 Start the Analysis 117 Chapter 9 Summary/Tips 126 109 • Goals and Exploratory Analysis S o your card sort was a success and now you have a great big bundle of data. You might have a file from an online sorting tool, a set of participants’ cards and labels, or a quickly scribbled list of the groups and cards from each session. But how do you figure out what you learned?

It’s time to get into analysis. There are two types of analysis: exploratory and statistical. Both approaches aim to help you spot the key patterns in your data and derive useful insights for your project. This chapter focuses on exploratory analysis. This type of analysis is about playing with your data to pick up some quick lessons and new perspectives. Exploratory analysis is fun and easy.

It actually encourages you to dig around and find patterns and easy insights you can use right away. The type of exploratory analysis I outline in this chapter helps you to examine: • What groups people form. • What classification schemes people use.

• What content is placed in each group. • Where individual cards are placed. • What words people use to describe their groups. Goals and Exploratory Analysis Analysis must support your goals of the card sort activity.

When planning for analysis, start by looking at your card-sorting goals. The next sections discuss some of the goals I outlined at the beginning of Chapter 3, “Defining the Need,” and how exploratory analysis helps you achieve them. Learning Broad Ideas If your goal was to learn broad ideas, you can use either exploratory or statistical analysis (or both). If you only have a small amount of data, stick to exploratory analysis—statistical analysis is probably overkill. If you have 110 Chapter 9 • Goals and Exploratory Analysis a lot of data, start with exploratory analysis and move to statistical if you feel it will help you gain insights. Determining Whether You’re on Track With a goal of determining whether you are on track with a project, exploratory analysis is usually sufficient.

It can help you check your assumptions against the responses of the participants. Investigating an Idea in Detail If you want to investigate something in a fair amount of detail, you can use exploratory analysis, but you will need to make sure you spend enough time on it to dig deep. My Examples In this and the next chapter, I use two example card sorts to illustrate the analysis process and the types of issues that arise.

The first is for the Information Architecture Summit. For this card sort, I used titles of presentations from three years of the conference. My goal was to learn about how people thought of this content, identify potential organization schemes and, for each organization scheme, determine the main groups that were formed. Torrent Cs Source Portable. The card sort contained 99 cards and 19 participants, and the data was originally collected remotely with a range of software tools.

The second is a card sort I run when I teach information architecture workshops. The idea is that the workshop participants are designing a website for a wine region. The content features examples of information that might be included in that type of website—lists of wineries, lists of accommodation and restaurants, local services, and things to see and do. In this case, the card sort contained 39 cards and was completed by 10 participant teams. For both card sorts, I put the data into my own analysis spreadsheet1 and statistical software XLSTAT2 for analysis. The data for each is available from the book’s website, so you can play around with it as well. 1 www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/blog/card_sort_analysis_spreadsheet/ 2 www.xlstat.com/en/home/ Use Exploratory Analysis 111 • Preparing for Exploratory Analysis Preparing for Exploratory Analysis If your card sort is very simple—with a small number of cards and small number of participants—you may not need to do any preparation.