Spirit Softworks can conduct card-sorting studies for you to determine whether your digital products’ organizational models and labeling schemes match your target users’ mental models. Card sorting is a simple user-centered design method through which you can quickly discover users’ mental models of organizational schemes, categories, and relationships between objects by having participants sort index cards into groups. The index cards might contain labels, terms, descriptions of content, images, or sample content.

Benefits of Card-Sorting Studies

Card-sorting techniques can provide insights into

• organizing digital information products and applications to improve findability
• creating easy-to-follow workflows
• creating appropriate lexicons, or controlled vocabularies, for digital products
• devising clear labeling schemes for digital products—particularly for their navigation systems

Spirit can identify patterns in the card-sorting data as well as areas of disagreement among study participants, which may point to

• differences between participants that indicate there are multiple user groups
• functionality, labels, or content that confused participants
• content that belongs in more than one category
• a need for alternative workflows
• a need for alternative navigation paths through content