Card Sorting in 2018: Explanation, Example, and Online Tools - hernandezmucall

In a nutshell, Information Computer architecture is about grouping and labeling the information. How to do it? When in trouble, use the card sorting.

Let's apply it to real life sentence tax: sorting euphony moods for our euphony project, Fugue.

Music Moods?

Right. Preparing our music library, we had to classify the music moods into several categories. I felt like the Thayer Mood Exemplar is a good start.

It looks great, but will our usability testing confirm it? Thayer Mood Compartmentalization
Picture credits: Michael Nuzzolo, Bhar, 2014.

Questions to Resolve

• Will our usability testing confirm this model?
• Answer people intuitively classify our medicine genres into the same categories?
• Bequeath our usability testing meliorate it?

Data

The tilt of tags that our music producers brought:

• Action
• Aggressive
• Angry
• Beautiful
• Settled, etc.

Wag Sorting: The Method

We'll utilise batting order sorting. In short, we set back each music genre on a separate card. We ask in people to sort these cards into the piles in some logical way and name each pile.

Then, afterward the testing is fix and the participants went away, you sit on the floor late in the night. The goal is to solve something before the cleaners throw this garbage away in the aurora.

The original way of conducting this research involves the actual, physiological paper card game. The method is thusly old that the literature refers to the paper version of this test.

Paper card sorting. Image from the book by Donna Spencer. I didn't read it, but I've show respective other books aside Rosenfeld Media, and they were each gravid.

I did it the old report way, and let Pine Tree State tell you something: it sucks. It requires an extreme measure of manual work even with a few participants. Permit's use the software system.

Choosing Software system

Card sorting software is not the variety of flashy software that goes ICO or receives financial support from YCombinator. Good-looking, contemporaneous design, responsive pages, and fun imitate — that's not something you'll find here. There are few services, and they look quite gray-haired and dusty.

I've used Optimal Workshop before. IT was ok, but they rose the prices around 10x. And let me put it this direction: information technology didn't get 10x better.

Some of the alternatives are too ugly to be used by a service for designers the likes of us, so I chose Usabilititest. Right, the name is misspelled. I wonder if they misspelled it when registering a arena, and decided it's not worthy spending another 8 dollars for the right spelled one.

Pros and Cons of Usabilititest

Usabilititest revolved to glucinium a good choice.

It has a comparatively OK purpose. In the world of user interfaces, it's not a beauty like Scarlett Johansen, but neither Woody Allen.

Usabilititest looks ok. Information technology's non the thrash of the cream, but you won't atomic number 4 ashamed either.

My biggest cons are cognate to the interpretation of the results. For instance, the page doesn't use the full width of the cover for a multi-column hold over.

A usability puppet with stinky usability: the table width is set, so 50% of the vertical space is wasted. You have to scroll horizontally this multi-column table within a tiny iframe.

In all probability the worst of each, it mishandles the custom group titles. If one drug user created a group called "Intemperate" and another one created the group known as "Intense," this software creates ii columns rather of one.

Ii different columns. I'd prefer if the software joins them into a single one.

We've created two card categorisation tests:

• Moods of medicine (Calm, Romantic)
• Usages of music (Cyberspace, TV, etc.)

Creating a test is straightforward. Mostly, you add the cards and call it a day.

Cards

The software also suggests defining some groups. It makes sensation, taking into account the software does undersize to join the groups, even equally named ones. I'm not even telling about clump the groups that are called differently.

Finally, you'll get a link to the public page. You're ready to institutionalise it to the participants.

Recruiting Participants

We have the howling biotic community at Icons8. They saved us on galore occasions. We've sent a posting asking for help and received some 500 responses for each of the tests in less than 24 hours.

The mailing we've sent to our participants (the whole message). Many thanks to those who participated!

Another way of recruiting users is Upwork. I used to hire the users there. Just explain the tax beforehand and pay back the person's usual unit of time rate.

Results

As mentioned higher up, the reports are not usable. Consequently, let's:

• Exportation them to CSV
• Import to Google Spreadsheets
• Mathematical group similar columns.

Card categorization results (Google Spreadsheets table). Green are the categories we offered users; yellow is the categories that users recommended. Delight note that greens have much higher numbers than the yellow ones; that's hunky-dory.

The final step: let USA group the moods that scored or s significant votes into the categories. Ta-dam!

Here we go with the final sort of the moods. Set! Some of the moods fall into quadruplex categories. That's fine. Different people look for the same things in contrasting places.

And the final result is on our website:

The final result on our website.

Meet Fugue, ladies and gentlemen.

About the generator: Ivan Wernher von Braun, UX designer, founder of Icons8
Title image: Moose stock photos

Check Psychogenic fugue, huge collection of free music for videos and games, discover nigh the myths along useableness testing and read a case study on Airbnb redesign for user goals

Source: https://blog.icons8.com/articles/card-sorting-explanation-example-online-tools/

Posted by: hernandezmucall.blogspot.com

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