Playing Your Cards Right: Getting the Most from Card Sorting for Navigation Design

摘要

Card sorting is a knowledge-elicitation technique often used by information architects, interaction designers, and usability professionals to establish or assess the navigation hierarchy of a Web site. The items are typically menu entries or hyperlinks, while the groups are categories or headings. The process involves asking participants to sort items into meaningful groups. In open card sorts, the number and names of groups are decided by each participant, while in the closed card sorts, these factors are fixed by the researcher in advance. Analysis of card-sorting results range from simple counting of the number of times items were grouped together to the rather intimidating "monothetic agglom-erative cluster analysis" (known simply as cluster analysis in most cases). Unfortunately, no single technique provides everything a researcher needs to know, especially if convincing evidence is needed to persuade col-leagues or customers of the effectiveness of a proposed design.