Design Critique

They're back! In part 2 of our wordcast episode on card sorts, recorded mid-December of 2007, Tim Keirnan, Larry Rusinsky, and Chris Farnum discuss conducting the sort, what we might do with the data afterwards, and what the end result of the card sort can be. We also mention the following applications that can help you do card sorts:

Optimal Sort (www.optimalsort.com)
Card Zort (www.cardzort.com)
Web Sort (www.websort.net)

Here's another one:
uzCardSort (http://uzilla.mozdev.org/cardsort.html)

The websites Tim and Chris mention during one of the occasional side discussions are:
www.nike.com
www.miniusa.com
www.mini.ca

Note how the Mini Cooper website for the United States differs from the Canadian one. Interesting how a company assigns different content and structure to one audience versus another.

Don't forget Internet User Experience 2008 to be held next week:
www.internetuserexperience.biz

Email from listener Dan completes the episode.

Return of the wordcast! Timothy Keirnan was joined by Chris Farnum and Larry Rusinsky back in December 2007 for a discussion about card sorts. What are they, why do user experience professionals use them, and how are they sometimes done?

Mixed in with some theory is a lot of practitioner anecdotes--so much so that we divided this wordcast into two parts. Without getting into more exotic card sort methods, there was plenty of discussion to go around.

In part two, the cohosts will discuss tools for doing card sorts online, analyzing the data from card sorts, plus even more anecdotes.