Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Running a Card Sort

After you’ve welcomed the participant or participants, explain what they are about to do. This introduction should go something like this:

Hi, my name is Lukas Mathis. I’m currently working on the design for a new Twitter application. Twitter is a social networking tool, similar to Facebook.

Right now, I’m working on the basic organization of the app—you know, where to put which feature, stuff like that. The exercise we’re about to do will help me understand where people expect to find things in our application.

In a minute, I’m going to give you a bunch of index cards that have words written on them. These words are things that exist in our application, like features or objects. What I want you to do is to group these index ...