Customer Reviews

Card Sorting

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This is a great book for someone tasked with organising content on a website who is either unfamiliar or unconfident with card sorting. Read this book and absorb it's advice and you'll avoid countless mistakes that people often face with card sorting!
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Put your hands up who remembers their first card sort? Of course you do, because it probably went horribly wrong!

Because card sorting (like many user-centered design and research tools) is grounded in common sense, it's hard to imagine what could possibly go wrong when asking people to sort a pile of cards into sensible groups.

But if you've ever run a card sort before, you'll know that although the principles behind it are simple, it's the thoughtful details in preparation, execution, and analysis that will make or break a card sort.

A real life example: My first card sort was for a website with about 1,000 pages. We enticed friends and family to come in for an evening with drinks and pizza and had teams of people sort a subset of content into groups. Each team came up with more or less the same result - which coincidentally closely matched the existing site structure.

Our management were relieved - we must already have the best structure, so there was no need to look at rearranging content. I left the exercise not convinced with this, but at the same time confused since "how could the cards lie?"

Unfortunately I didn't have Donna's book to help answer that question, but on reflection realised that the card labels I had used were introducing a strong bias in suggesting groups that matched the existing site.

You could learn by trial-and-error (like me), or piece together snippets of many useful (although sometimes contradictory) articles and posts on the internet (BTW some of the best are also written by Donna), but there is nothing that gives such a complete, and practical reference to every step of running a card sort than Card Sorting by Donna Spencer.

The book is divided into three main sections, covering preparation, execution, and analysis of a card sorting activity.

A nice touch is the two page FAQs before even the contents that gives quick answers to some common card sorting questions (like "should I let people put cards in more than one place?") and send you deeper into the book for more in-depth information.

The best chapters were in the 'preparation' and 'execution' sections, which make up the bulk of the book. Donna writes with confidence and clarity, and also humility - several anecdotes of card sorts that haven't run quite perfectly are provided, these serve as good learning devices by pointing out common mistakes, but also remind readers who may have had negative experiences with card sorting in the past to keep on persevering.

The last chapters (which cover analysis of data collected from card sorting) are good at explaining a spreadsheet-based approach that Donna developed and uses, but start to get a little vague in explaining some other methods of analysis where the focus changes from practical advice to more of a summary of different methods that are available.

These other methods could have been expanded into much more detail (maybe Donna has a sequel planned - "Advanced Card Sorting" ;-), or perhaps could have just been included as an appendix. If you just stick with the spreadsheet method and ignore the other stuff you will probably be fine.

There are heaps of gems of useful advice and ideas in this book, and as I was reading I was happily agreeing to myself "wow, this is so great stuff" but at the same time some ideas aren't always spelt out. My recommendation would be to read this book with your highlighter and marking bits that stand out, then after each card sort dive in again because some things will become clearer in retrospect (doesn't everything?).

Recently I've been experimenting with using card sorting for goals outside of content organising, specifically for running requirements prioritisation workshops. I'm sure other people have found other uses of applying card sorting and I would have liked to have seen some discussion of this also included in the book.

Another area to might have been to walk people more specifically through examples of how analysing data, complemented with other research, had influenced specific content organisation decisions, but perhaps this was intentionally omitted because including this might have lead people to try and inappropriately apply these situations to their own projects.

But to wrap up (and slight repeat): This is a great book for someone tasked with organising content on a website who is either unfamiliar or unconfident with card sorting. Read this book and absorb it's advice and you'll avoid countless mistakes that people often face with card sorting!

For people who feel they are confident with card sorting (like me), you might also get some value it might help give clarity in discussing card sorting with your client or stakeholders, or in my case I'm glad to say it's lead me to question ideas that I'd previously taken for granted, for example this book has helped challenge my opinion of team based card sorts.

Many successful card sorts to you!

Card sorting, for all its outward simplicity, can go really really wrong, or at least not as well as it should, very easily. And it looks so simple (that, and using stickies on brown paper) that it tends to be a hard sell among the more serious folk who already know what they want and have more grown-up things to think about. This book is the tool fixes all that.

I've been doing IA and usability, on and off, formally and informally, since the mid nineties. Much of my training was on the job, and the rest was serendipitous, so there were things I knew well, things I was learning as I went along, and things I was learning from reading blogs like Donna's.

What I didn't expect was that there was so much more to know about the things I thought I knew. New perspectives, subtle nuances that could have really major impact on my thinking and my work. Things that could be the difference between near-greatness, however fleeting, and FAIL.

Then there was a certain amount of basic information I hoped to find and did, and the extra bonus of finding so much I didn't even know that I needed to know.

So where before I had a pretty good understanding of what I was doing, Donna has taught me a lot I wish I'd known long ago, helped me organize my thinking around more substantive principles, and helped me communicate more effectively with subjects and stakeholders. And that brings me to the best part. Donna's simple, elegant style and clarity (in a word, understandability) have made this a book I can use to bring beginners, doubters, naysayers, and even colleagues who don't quite get it to the table, where it all starts.

This book is for everyone who has ever done a card sort, is doing a card sort, or will ever do a card sort. It's a deceptively quick read, and a lot of re-thinking, going back, and thinking again.

This is the book on card sorting. And it's the first book I've had both in print and on my iPhone.

I've sometimes met client resistance to card sorting because it sounds 'too easy'. What, just put topics on cards and find out how users group them? Will that really be enough?

The answer is: yes, it surely will be. Especially, as Donna Spencer points out in this engaging little book, if you pay attention to what the users say about what they are doing as well as to how they group the cards.

Donna writes from her many years of experience of using card sorting, including what went badly as well as the successes. If you're new to card sorting, then this book with take you step by simple step through what you have to do - and she isn't afraid to warn you that you'll still have to think about what you learn.

Even if you've run many card sorts, you'll find some useful tips and new angles.

Best of all, she pares it all down to the essentials - even in the hardest chapter, about choosing an appropriate statistical analysis (and she makes it clear that using any stats is optional).

Recommended.

This is an awesome book. Card sorting is a tool that all kinds of UX-related people can and should get into, and this is the perfect book to get them started. The reason I love this book is simple:

1) It's short - 162 pages cover to cover
2) It's focused - all about card sorting, so you know exactly what you're getting into
3) It's practical - nothing earth shattering here, just good, simple, practical advice that *you* can implement from someone who knows what they are talking about

Not to mention it's full-color, always a plus. Highly recommended.

I learnt card sorting via trial and error, lots of practice, reading the occasional blog or article, fine tuning as you go, that was while ago.

Back then Perth was a little isolated, in has only been recently that web based workshops or conferences have been held in Perth that we have had excess face to face with the best of the web.

This is where practical books like Donna Spencer's Card Sorting can fill the gap.

Now you would think that this book would be a waste of time for someone like me. Well that's what I thought too, but I was wrong.

Donna's book is filled with the shortcuts, pitfalls, and professional enhancements that you can make to your card sort technique. It's a lot more than just usual simple chapter on card sorting basics that so many books have.

It's a short book (162 pages), one you can very easily read on a 5 hour plane flight (which I did). However it isn't light on detail. Donna Spencer seems to have crammed the entire card sorting process along with various case studies into this handy book.

The book begins at the best place, giving you an overview of what card sorting is and isn't and the best places to apply it. It's interesting here as it is suggested that card sorting can be applied to all sorts of things not just web sites. I can contest to this; have card sorts many a collection of topics or information in a effort to find the magical categorisation sequence.
Next the book launches right into the practical application on how to run a card sort. It covers the best method to use, choosing the content, participants, card construction, and session facilitation. As well as bucket load of tips and tricks to help you out when your card sort is doing pear shaped.

"The most important thing is to listen to the discussion. Make notes of the ways people describe what they are doing."

It's interesting but this quote reminded me that sometimes you can also learn a lot more additional information, such as user stories and the like from just listening carefully to the participants during a card sort. Hence a card sort can often product a wealth of information beyond the draft information organization. Your just have to listen and question.

This book also takes the time to step through the entire analysis process of the data you have collected during the sort. It deals with the exploratory analysis process in detail and the intense drilling down into the organisational scheme people use.

Statistical Analysis is also covered, don't worry you don't need to be a maths scholar to understand this section. Card sorting very simply steps through the use of k-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis, showing you the outcomes and why you need to use these analysis tools.

Donna rounds the book off with a brilliant summary chapter full of overarching advice. My favourite is:

"Don't assume anything - think hard about what you have learned from the card sort and its underlying meaning."

Now I think we can apply that to all aspects of user research not just card sorting.

If you're card sorting guru (like Donna) then maybe this book is not for you. But if you are a user experience or information management professional and just want to learn or improve your card sorting, then this book is a must have for your bookshelf.

This is quite a useful reference to have. It is does not sit on your desk unread like most other HCI reference books. The case-studies are interesting but not that informative. The useful parts of the book (which make the purchase wortwhile) are the practical tips and solutions provided with every approach. I also recommend getting this book in a PDF version from the main publishers. A good book to have if you work on usability studies.