Creating your card sorting list

First step is to create a list of potential labels for your site. Do not worry about grouping these, we will be grouping them during the class card-sorting session. You will want to have about 45 to 50 labels. 30 is too few; 70 is too many.

Resources for labels:

1. Your museum's existing labels
2. The competition museum's sites. Try this site: http://www.museumsusa.org/ Using their search, I found nine jazz museums, 24 cowboy museums and 36 computer museums.
3. Your users (ask your personas what they would want to see as labels, headings or categories).
4. Brainstorm: Keep in mind Morville's admonition to be like Noah and take one of each kind of thing.

Here is a description of the archetypal card sorting (done by Nielsen, of course). Below is an excerpt from: SunWeb: User Interface Design for Sun Microsystem's Internal Web Jakob Nielsen and Darrell Sano, in the Electronic Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web, 1994.

"Card sorting is a common usability technique that is often used to discover users' mental model of an information space. A typical application is to get ideas for menu structures by asking users to sort cards with the command names: commands that get sorted together often should probably be in the same menu. A downside of the method is that users may not always have optimal models, and card sorting (or other similarity measures) is often used to assess the difference between the way novice and expert users understand a system.

Before our card sorting study, the SunWeb development group had brainstormed about possible information services to be provided over the system, resulting in a list of 51 types of information. We wrote the name of each of these services on a 3-by-4 inch notecard. In a few cases we also wrote a one-line explanation on the card.

Before each user entered the lab, the cards were scattered around the desk in random order. The users were asked to sit down at a table and sort the cards into piles according to similarity. Users were encouraged not to produce too small or too large piles but they were not requested to place any specific number of cards in each pile. After a user had sorted the cards into piles of similar cards, the user was asked to group the piles into larger groups that seemed to belong together and to invent a name for each group. These names were written on Post-It notes and placed on the table next to the groups. The users typically completed the entire process in about 30 minutes, though some took about 40 minutes.

The data from this study was lists of named groups of cards with subgroups corresponding to the original piles. Based on this information, it is possible to calculate similarity ratings for the various concepts by giving a pair of concepts one similarity point for each time both concepts occur in the same larger cluster and two points for each time they occur in the same pile. This similarity matrix can then be fed to one of the many standard statistics packages for a cluster analysis. It is also possible to use other statistical techniques such as multidimensional scaling. "

You will need to put these on index cards. Which means you will need index cards. You can buy them at any grocery or drug store in the stationery/pen section.

We will discuss the list in class a few days before the card sorting. You will need to then copy your labels onto 3 X 5 index cards, which you will bring to class for the card sorting exercise.