Basalam Website Card sorting case study:
Card sorting is a research technique used by information professionals to explore how people group items in order to develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find those items, such as optimizing structured information being used for site navigation.
There are various forms of this (closed sort, open sort, and hybrid); for the purposes of our project, we decided to start off with an open card sorting, which involves presenting users with a list of “cards” consisting of pieces of items that could be found on a site.
Users are asked to group these in a way that makes sense to them and to name these groups.
Last month when I just joined Basalam eCommerce We focused on an unordered list of approximately 180 product names used for site navigation.
The management team for this product line introduced a basic categorization scheme for these products. We took what we believed to be a representative subset of the list (about 36 subsets) and plugged it into Optimal Sort, a web-based card sorting application. We then recruited a set of about 153 people among Basalam users and offered them a Basalam gift card if they would complete our survey.
in the next step, we sent them an instruction link which explains how the study is going on step by step with the picture and accurate explanation, and Users are asked to group the cards in a way that makes sense to them and to name these groups.
The test took us a week to write the test scenario and prepare the list of participants and set up our OptimalSort instance, two weeks of persistent effort to recruit a significant number of participants, and two weeks or so to take the firehose of data from OptimalSort and crunch it into something actionable and easy to understand.
The challenge which we had was The greater the number of items to be sorted, the more time it takes for users to do the sort, and the higher the likelihood that they will not complete the exercise. hence we divided our test into 3 tests with almost 60 items and 50 participants for each test.
We actually had to change our method mid-stream by configuring OptimalSort to require users to sort all items before finishing.
Even then, we had users engaging in categorization that was not exactly mindful in order to qualify for the almighty gift card.
Moreover, the more items there are to be sorted, the more effort is required to identify patterns in the sort data.
While card sorting was a useful technique in identifying groupings, we needed to employ a different user research methodology to test and validate the hypothetical hierarchy generated by our card sorting exercise.so After analyzing the results we found out that some items did not make sense and needed tree testing to show us an obvious result thus we built a tree with 13 tasks and 30 participants to complete our study, after analyzing both studies I shared it with my group and then we complete the final category`s document.
A card sorting exercise can be extremely helpful because it allows you to see how users are sifting through and prioritizing your information in their minds. This exercise can give excellent insights into how to create an information hierarchy and thus develop an effective story flow for your website.