In the second of In the second of our Thought Leader series Sam Ng catches up with Donna Maurer from Australian company MaadMob. Donna is an acknowledged leader in the field of information architecture and is currently writing a book on card sorting. Here’s what they discussed:

Sam: So Donna, many of our readers would have heard of you before but, for those who don’t know you, how would you describe what you do and how you’ve come to achieve celebrity status with regard to card sorting?

Donna: I work as a freelance information architect and interaction designer. I usually work on big websites, intranets and business application - either organising all the content (that’s the information architect bit) or designing the pages, interfaces and way things work (that’s the interaction designer bit).

When I was learning IA, I heard about card sorting and I got the impression that it was the ultimate (and easy) technique for creating an IA. So I tried it and had all sorts of problems. I started blogging about my problems & questioning the value of the technique.

But as I did more IA work and gained a better understanding of classification and categorisation theory I started to think about how to use card sorting more effectively. I realized that card sorting is a good support technique for the category development process but is not a replacement for it. Now I don’t rely on card sorting as the only approach, but one method among many to help me organise things.

Sam: One of the biggest challenges with card sorting is analysis and making sense of results. Where do you suggest people start?

Donna: At the beginning ;-

Seriously, analysis starts before the card sort starts. You have to know what you want to learn and run the card sort in the right way - involving an appropriate number of participants and cards. It is wasteful to run a detailed, remote card sort with hundreds of participants if you just want to get some initial insights into how people think. And it’s just as silly to involve 6 people and a small set of cards if you want to explore all the ways content can be grouped.

If you plan up front, analysis does become easier. In the first example (when you want some initial insights), run an in-person team-based sort and don’t collect more data than you need. It then is fairly easy to do some qualitative analysis and identify the main insights. For the second example (exploring content groupings in detail), you need to get organised up front and store your data in a way that lets you do more in-depth analysis - either with a statistical tool or something like my card sorting spreadsheet. That way you aren’t overwhelmed with so much data that you can’t identify patterns.

Sam: Do you ‘eyeball’ the data? I’m sure this can mean different things to different people (and I bet experience counts for a lot). Any practical tips and guidelines on how you ‘eyeball’ data? What do you look for?

Donna: Some of the ‘eyeballing’ process (where you mainly look at what you have collected) is to spot the ‘interesting’ things - the things that you didn’t expect to see or that surprise you. It is also to spot the things that support your ideas. It isn’t about coming up with a structure, but finding insights and patterns.

You’re right - it becomes easier with experience - you have a better idea of what to expect and can notice the ‘interesting’ things more easily. But even without experience, a card sort will help you learn things you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Sam: Many people expect that card sorts produce site maps. What is your response to that? And what are the outputs from one of your card sort projects?

Donna: My response to that is that you should never let any technique do the work for you. A technique is a tool to help you learn things, not create answers.

Sure, a card sort can produce a sitemap - you can collect data, run the outputs through a statistical tool and make a dendogram - a hierarchical site map. But you shouldn’t just use that as the sitemap for your website. The card sort doesn’t consider the business goals of the site, what users need to achieve and how they are likely to work. It just shows you some ideas for grouping content - this is hugely valuable, just not the only thing you need to consider. You have to put that together with many other things to create a good structure for a site.

Sam: There are a lot of people who love the idea of a card sort but find it hard to convince the powers to be to let them run a card sort. Any tips on how to do this?

Donna:I’m a bit cheeky sometimes. I tell my clients that they can let me make it up and take the risk that I get it wrong and have to start over. Or they can let me get some user input, be more likely to get it right the first time and be able to demonstrate why it is right. That goes for any type of user research, not just card sorting.