Card [1] sorting is a technique in user experience design in which a person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a dendrogram (category tree) or folksonomy. It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.
Card sorting uses a relatively low-tech approach. The person conducting the test (usability analyst, user experience designer, etc.) first identifies key concepts and writes them on index cards or Post-it notes. Test subjects, individually or sometimes as a group, then arrange the cards to represent how they see the structure and relationships of the information. [2]
Groups can be organized as collaborative groups (focus groups) or as repeated individual sorts. The literature discusses appropriate numbers of users needed to produce trustworthy results. [3]
A card sort is commonly undertaken when designing a navigation structure for an environment that offers a variety of content and functions, such as a web site. [4] [5] [6] [7] In that context, the items to organize are those significant in the environment. The way the items are organized should make sense to the target audience and cannot be determined from first principles.[ citation needed ]
The field of information architecture is founded on the study of the structure of information. If an accepted and standardized taxonomy exists for a subject, it would be natural to apply that taxonomy to organize both the information in the environment, and any navigation to particular subjects or functions.[ citation needed ] Card sorting is useful when:
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To perform a card sort:
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In an open card sort, participants create their own names for the categories. This helps reveal not only how they mentally classify the cards, but also what terms they use for the categories. Open sorting is generative; it is typically used to discover patterns in how participants classify, which in turn helps generate ideas for organizing information.
In a closed card sort, participants are provided with a predetermined set of category names. They then assign the index cards to these fixed categories. This helps reveal the degree to which the participants agree on which cards belong under each category. Closed sorting is evaluative; it is typically used to judge whether a given set of category names provides an effective way to organize a given collection of content.
In a reverse card sort (more popularly called tree testing), an existing structure of categories and sub-categories is tested. Users are given tasks and are asked to complete them navigating a collection of cards. Each card contains the names of subcategories related to a category, and the user should find the card most relevant to the given task starting from the main card with the top-level categories. This ensures that the structure is evaluated in isolation, nullifying the effects of navigational aids, visual design, and other factors. Reverse card sorting is evaluative—it judges whether a predetermined hierarchy provides a good way to find information.
Created by Celeste Paul, The Modified-Delphi card sort is based on the Delphi method. Rather than each participant creating their own card sort, only the first participant does a full card sort of organizing and arranging items. The next participant iterates on the first participant's model, then the third participant iterates on the second's model, and so on. The idea is that with each iteration the card sort gets more refined with fewer participants and consensus is built sooner. [8]
Various methods can be used to analyze the data. The purpose of the analysis is to extract patterns from the population of test subjects, so that a common set of categories and relationships emerges. This common set is then incorporated into the design of the environment, either for navigation or for other purposes. Card sorting is also evaluated through dendrograms. There is some indication that different evaluation methods for card sorting provide different results. [9]
Card sorting is an established technique with an emerging literature. [10] [ page needed ]
A number of web-based tools are available to perform card sorting. The perceived advantage of web-based card sorting is that it reaches a larger group of participants at a lower cost. The software can also help analyze the sort results. A perceived disadvantage of a remote card sort is the lack of personal interaction between card sort participants and the card sort administrator, which may produce valuable insights. [11]
Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. It is more concerned with the design intuitiveness of the product and tested with users who have no prior exposure to it. Such testing is paramount to the success of an end product as a fully functioning application that creates confusion amongst its users will not last for long. This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.
Usability engineering is a field that is concerned generally with human–computer interaction and specifically with devising human–computer interfaces that have high usability or user friendliness. It provides structured methods for achieving efficiency and elegance in interface design.
Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape. Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.
Personal information management (PIM) is the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use information items such as documents, web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person's various roles.
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.
User-centered design (UCD) or user-driven development (UDD) is a framework of process in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. These tests are conducted with/without actual users during each stage of the process from requirements, pre-production models and post production, completing a circle of proof back to and ensuring that "development proceeds with the user as the center of focus." Such testing is necessary as it is often very difficult for the designers of a product to understand intuitively the first-time users of their design experiences, and what each user's learning curve may look like. User-centered design is based on the understanding of a user, their demands, priorities and experiences and when used, is known to lead to an increased product usefulness and usability as it delivers satisfaction to the user.
Findability is the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web, the term is usually used in that context. Most relevant websites do not come up in the top results because designers and engineers do not cater to the way ranking algorithms work currently. Its importance can be determined from the first law of e-commerce, which states "If the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product." As of December 2014, out of 10.3 billion monthly Google searches by Internet users in the United States, an estimated 78% are made to research products and services online.
The user experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts; conversely, designing toward profitability often conflicts with ethical user experience objectives and even causes harm. User experience is subjective. However, the attributes that make up the user experience are objective.
Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process. Based on the results of testing the most recent iteration of a design, changes and refinements are made. This process is intended to ultimately improve the quality and functionality of a design. In iterative design, interaction with the designed system is used as a form of research for informing and evolving a project, as successive versions, or iterations of a design are implemented.
A website wireframe, also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint, is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. The term wireframe is taken from other fields that use a skeletal framework to represent 3 dimensional shape and volume. Wireframes are created for the purpose of arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose. The purpose is usually driven by a business objective and a creative idea. The wireframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website's content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together. The wireframe usually lacks typographic style, color, or graphics, since the main focus lies in functionality, behavior, and priority of content. In other words, it focuses on what a screen does, not what it looks like. Wireframes can be pencil drawings or sketches on a whiteboard, or they can be produced by means of a broad array of free or commercial software applications. Wireframes are generally created by business analysts, user experience designers, developers, visual designers, and by those with expertise in interaction design, information architecture and user research.
WebML is a visual notation and a methodology for designing complex data-intensive Web applications. It provides graphical, yet formal, specifications, embodied in a complete design process, which can be assisted by visual design tools.
User experience design is the process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a digital product or website. Design decisions in UX design are often driven by research, data analysis, and test results rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), which encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.
Contextual design (CD) is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human–computer interfaces. In practice, this means that researchers aggregate data from customers in the field where people are living and applying these findings into a final product. Contextual design can be seen as an alternative to engineering and feature driven models of creating new systems.
Adaptive hypermedia (AH) uses hypermedia which is adaptive according to a user model. In contrast to linear media, where all users are offered a standard series of hyperlinks, adaptive hypermedia (AH) tailors what the user is offered based on a model of the user's goals, preferences and knowledge, thus providing links or content most appropriate to the current user.
RITE Method, for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, typically referred to as "RITE" testing, is an iterative usability method. It was defined by Michael Medlock, Dennis Wixon, Bill Fulton, Mark Terrano and Ramon Romero. It has been publicly championed by Dennis Wixon while working in the games space for Microsoft. It has many similarities to "traditional" or "discount" usability testing. The tester and team must define a target population for testing, schedule participants to come into the lab, decide on how the users' behaviors will be measured, construct a test script and have participants engage in a verbal protocol. However it differs from these methods in that it advocates that changes to the user interface are made as soon as a problem is identified and a solution is clear. Sometimes this can occur after observing as few as one participant. Once the data for a participant has been collected the usability engineer and team decide if they will be making any changes to the prototype prior to the next participant. The changed interface is then tested with the remaining users. The philosophy behind the RITE method is described as: "1) once you find a problem, solve it as soon as you can, and 2) make the decision makers part of the research team." In this way it is a bridge between a strict research method and a design method...and in many ways it represents a participatory design method.
"As Researchers you get a lot of fundamental training on what constitutes actionable proof. That fundamental training focuses on 'completing your research' before drawing conclusions. In publishing RITE we wanted Researchers to acknowledge that in the correct circumstances you can make strong and accurate conclusions and 'complete research' quite quickly. Perhaps more importantly, the standard literature on usability testing was indexed on accurate identification of problem areas. The key word in the RITE acronym is Iterative. Through iteration you can prove that something is fixed, which we felt was a more important way to think about research findings. Find a thing. That's nice. Find and fix it. Far better." — Ramon Romero
Useware is a generic term introduced in 1998 that denotes all hard- and software components of a technical system which serve its interactive use. The main idea of the term Useware is the focus of technical design according to human abilities and needs. The only promising method to design future technical products and systems is to understand human abilities and limitations and to focus the technology on these abilities and limitations.
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".
Tree testing is a usability technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website. It is also known as reverse card sorting or card-based classification.
User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through interviews, surveys, usability evaluations and other forms of feedback methodologies. It is used to understand how people interact with products and evaluate whether design solutions meet their needs. This field of research aims at improving the user experience (UX) of products, services, or processes by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User research is used to improve a multitude of products like websites, mobile phones, medical devices, banking, government services and many more. It is an iterative process that can be used at anytime during product development and is a core part of user-centered design.
Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.
