Back in 2004 we were doing a card sorting project for a banking client, and really needed to be able to slice-and-dice the data in ways that existing tools didn’t support. We didn’t find anything that could do what we wanted, so we ended up building our own Flash-based card sorting tool over a weekend.

Three hectic years later, we finally ended up releasing a public beta of our card sorting tool to the world. It had gone through a lot more testing and revisions by that stage, and several thousand participants had completed card sorts for our clients. We thought it was pretty useful but we weren’t sure if anyone else would think so.

Given that we’ve had the tool out in the wild for nearly 18 months we thought it would be fun to some analysis into who was using Optimal Sort, and what they were doing. (We first talked about this stuff at OZ-IA 2008, and you can get the presentation online).

So, our first fact is that information architects are very multinational. The 2,552 Optimal Sort customers come from 121 countries, including some unusual locations like Mozambique, Ghana, Bolivia, Serbia, the Bahamas, Georgia, Malta and the Cayman Islands. (As a general rule, Asian countries are vastly under-represented in our customers, possibly because our tool doesn’t support non-English languages.)

People using Optimal Sort tend to work for an internal team (45% of users), which is typically small in size (48% work in a team of less than 5 people).

The companies that they work for though, are massive. Our customers come from organisations that have an average (!) of 5,169 staff.

All those information architects have definitely been busy. Since we went live with the public version of Optimal Sort, 3,875 different card sort studies have been run. A staggering 117,932 people have completed a card sort.

What’s interesting is to see that 65% of the card sorts are what we called open sorts. (Open sorts are when you let participants choose their own category names, whereas in a closed card sort you force people to drop the cards into pre-defined categories.)

The reason there are more open sorts than closed sorts is that closed card sorts aren’t very useful. They are one way of validating a proposed information architecture, but there are much smarter, more robust ways of doing this. (Stay tuned for an announcement very soon of an exciting new tool to give you much more confidence that you have the structures and labels right.)

What is probably the clearest statistic of all is that information architecture as a field is growing in prominence and it’s growing fast.  According to the IA institute annual report there were 750 members in 2007. In 2008 there were 1,500 members. Its membership doubled in 12 short months. Doubled.

It’s a great time to be in the field, and we owe a depth of gratitude to all the pioneers who have used Optimal Sort and helped us to learn what it takes to make a useful card sorting tool. Thank you all!