Card Sorting and Usability

Nina Chkhenkeli, one of my colleagues and fellow digital librarian here at U.S. Geological Survey and Bernadette Guerra, who is a volunteer here working on the Digital Image Library for NBii and myself all attended the Card Sorting - Creating Clear Categories for Your Content seminar at the Department Of Labor on December 5th. The seminar was led by usability specialist Cari Wolfson, who did a fantastic job on familiarizing us with the card sorting process. For those who don't know (I didn't know either), card sorting is a process in usability studies by which a group of "users" are selected and given a group of cards that represent content that would go onto a website. The user is to then group the content and create "containers" or categories for which the content should go. The "cards" are sorted into the categories and the idea is that if this person were clicking on this site, this is where he or she would expect to find this particular content.

The seminar was really very interesting, and Cari did an excellent job at providing us with knowledge about card sorting as a way of analyzing web content and making sure web professionals are categorizing information successfully.