Card Sorting
So I’m working over at the Bentley Design and Usability Center for my spring internship. Since I don’t really have a background in Human Factors (I only started the program last week), they’ve been teaching me how to operate all of the lab equipment and how to conduct some of the different services they offer. I’ll cover what I’m allowed to tell you in future entries, but I did learn about one cool service we offer (even if not many folks use it). It’s called a card sort. Have you ever wondered how developers decide which options to stick under which menus? Like putting “Save” under “File”? If you do it the correct way, you use a card sort. They come in both open and closed formats. With a closed card sort, you give a user (or lots of users) a few cards with the menu titles on them, and then hand them a big stack of menu options. They then place the options under whatever menu headings seem “right” to them. An open sort works mostly in the same manner, except you give users a bunch of blank cards and a pen instead of some predetermined menu headings and let them make their own menus.
Doing this manually is a huge pain in the butt, but there are online services and software programs available now to allow you to easily send out sorts to various people, collect their inputs, and tabulate the results. The downside with the impersonal method is that you lose valuable verbal feedback and any insights you may have gathered from a participant’s thought process. You can sort of alleviate this with a sort of pre-scheduled “web conference” where everyone does their sorts at the same time with a moderator present and types any feedback into a chat window for future use.
Just one of the neat things Human Factors has to offer!