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Card sorting
What is card sorting?
Card sorting is a research method for understanding how people expect information to be organised. Participants are given a set of items, each on its own card, and asked to group them in ways that make sense to them. The patterns that emerge across many participants reveal the mental model your users actually hold, which is often different from the one your org chart produces.
There are three main variants. In an open sort, participants create and name their own groups, which is useful when you are designing structure from scratch. In a closed sort, you provide the categories and participants slot items into them, which tests whether your existing labels work. A hybrid sort lets people use your categories or invent their own. A retailer trying to fix a confusing menu might run an open sort with 40 product cards and discover customers group by occasion rather than by department.
Card sorting mostly informs information architecture: navigation, menus, and the way content is categorised. It pairs well with tree testing, which checks whether the resulting structure is findable. On its own a sort tells you how people think, not whether your final design works, so it sits early in the process rather than at the end.
Card sorting at Dallonses
We reach for card sorting when a client's navigation has grown by accretion and nobody can find anything. Rather than redraw the menu from internal logic, we put the real content in front of real users and watch how they sort it. The groupings rarely match what the business assumed, and that gap is usually the whole problem.
It is one of the methods we run inside UX research and behavioural insights, alongside interviews and usability testing. We turn the results into an information architecture the team can defend with evidence, then carry it into the user experience design so the structure shows up in the actual product. The aim is simple. People should find what they came for without thinking about it.
Users can't find what they need on your site? Let's see how they'd organise it.
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