Introduction
In our last lesson, we took the raw insights from our user research and transformed them into a prioritized list of actionable design opportunities. You now have a strategic roadmap defining what problems to solve. But before we can start designing the solution, we need to answer a fundamental question: where does everything go?
This lesson introduces you to the first pillar of Information Architecture (IA), the art and science of organizing and labeling content in a way that is intuitive and easy for users to understand. We will focus on card sorting, a powerful user research method that lets you peek directly into your users' minds to see how they naturally group information. For a freelancer, mastering this technique is key to creating logical website navigation and app structures that don't confuse or frustrate users—a direct contributor to client success.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to conduct your own card sorting exercise to organize a product's content into logical, user-centered groups.
What is Card Sorting?
At its core, card sorting is a method used to understand how people categorize information. You give participants a set of digital or physical "cards," each with a piece of content or a feature written on it, and ask them to group them in a way that makes sense to them.
Think of it this way: in your accounting work, you organize hundreds of transactions into a structured Chart of Accounts (Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Revenue, Expenses). You do this so that financial statements are logical and understandable. Card sorting is the user-centered equivalent for a digital product. We ask users to group content items to help us build a logical and understandable website or app structure.
The goal is to understand the user's mental model—their internal, often subconscious, understanding of how things relate to each other. When your product's structure matches the user's mental model, they can find what they need effortlessly.
To get a formal understanding of the concept, let's look at a quick resource.
Card Sorting in UX: A Beginner's Guide
This article from Looppanel provides a clear and concise introduction to card sorting.
Read the sections "What is card sorting?" and "When should you use card sorting?". Focus on understanding that the main goal is to uncover the user's "mental model"—how they naturally think information should be organized.
Types of Card Sorting
There isn't just one way to run a card sort. The method you choose depends on what you're trying to learn. The three main types are Open, Closed, and Hybrid.
Card Sorting for UX Research and Open vs. Closed Card Sorts
This video by UX researcher Matt Borchert clearly breaks down the different types of card sorts.
Watch the section from Open vs. Closed vs. Hybrid. Pay close attention to the key difference and when to use each: Open sort: Users create and name the groups themselves. Use this for generative research or discovery, like when you're designing a new website's navigation from scratch. Closed sort: Users sort cards into pre-defined groups that you provide. Use this for evaluative research or validation, like when you want to test if an existing navigation structure makes sense to users. Hybrid sort: A mix of both, where you provide some categories but also allow users to create new ones.
For the rest of this lesson, we will focus on the open card sort, as it's the most common type you'll use when starting a new project or a major redesign.
The Card Sorting Process: A Step-by-Step Guide
Conducting a card sort is a structured process. Given your background in analytical processes, you'll appreciate the methodical steps involved, from preparation to analysis.
Here's a high-level overview of the process:
- Define Objectives & Scope: What are you trying to structure? The entire website navigation? The settings menu of an app? Be clear about your goals.
- Prepare the Cards: Create a list of 30-60 content items or features. Each item should be written on a separate card. The labels should be clear and concise.
- Recruit Participants: For statistically significant results, 15-20 participants from your target audience are recommended. For qualitative insights, even 5-8 participants can reveal important patterns.
- Choose Your Tool & Conduct the Sort: You can use physical sticky notes, but digital tools are more common for remote research. They also make analysis much easier.
- Analyze the Results: This is where you look for patterns. Which cards were consistently grouped together? What names did people give those groups?
Since you are already in the Figma ecosystem, its whiteboarding tool, FigJam, is perfect for conducting a simple card sort.
FigJam for User Research Card Sorting
This official Figma video shows you exactly how to set up a card sorting board in a tool you're familiar with.
Watch from setting up the board. You don't need to worry about the advanced sharing or open session features for now. Just focus on the mechanics of creating sections and using sticky notes for an open card sort.
Analyzing the Results
After your participants have sorted the cards, the real work begins. Your goal is to turn those individual groupings into a coherent structure. While a deep quantitative analysis requires specialized software, you can perform a powerful qualitative analysis just by looking for patterns.
Specialized tools like Optimal Workshop can generate sophisticated visualizations like similarity matrices and dendrograms, which provide a more data-driven view of your results. It's useful to know what these are, as they are common deliverables in professional UX research.
Card Sorting for UX Research and Open vs. Closed Card Sorts
Let's revisit Matt Borchert's video to see how raw card sorting data is analyzed.
Watch the segment from on analysis tools. You don't need to master these tools now, but it's important to see the outputs. Pay attention to the concepts of a similarity matrix (shows which cards are most often grouped together) and a dendrogram (a tree diagram illustrating the grouping structure). This is how qualitative sorting can be quantified.
Your Turn: Conduct a Card Sort for a Gifting Website
It's time to put theory into practice. Let's use a scenario that leverages your entrepreneurial experience.
Scenario: You've been hired by an online boutique that sells a variety of bespoke gifts and related items. Their website is disorganized, and users can't find what they're looking for. Your first task is to propose a new, intuitive main navigation structure for their website. You decide to run an open card sort to understand how customers think about their products.
Task (approx. 30 minutes):
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Set Up Your Board in FigJam:
- Open a new FigJam file.
- Create a large area for your cards, perhaps with a heading like "Unsorted Items".
- Create sticky notes for each of the 22 content items listed below. Place them randomly in your unsorted area.
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The Card List:
- Wedding Gifts
- Anniversary Gifts
- Birthday Gifts
- Corporate Gifting
- Baby Shower Gifts
- Personalized Mugs
- Custom Photo Frames
- Engraved Jewelry
- Gift Hampers
- Flower Bouquets
- Chocolate Boxes
- Gift Wrapping Service
- Greeting Cards
- About Us
- Contact Us
- FAQ
- Shipping & Returns Policy
- Track Your Order
- My Account
- Blog / Gifting Ideas
- Customer Reviews
- Sale / Special Offers
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Perform an Open Card Sort:
- Acting as a typical user, drag the sticky notes into groups that make sense to you. There are no right or wrong answers.
- Once you've grouped the cards, use the text tool in FigJam to create a label for each group. Try to make the label a clear and concise category name (e.g., "Gifts by Occasion", "Personalized Items").
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Define Your Proposed Navigation:
- Based on the groups you created, create a new text box on your board.
- Title it "Proposed Main Navigation".
- List the category names you created. This list represents your first, user-informed draft of the website's main navigation menu.
This exercise will give you a hands-on feel for the entire process, from setting up the cards to deriving a potential information architecture.
Conclusion
In this lesson, you've learned how to use card sorting to lay the foundation for a product's information architecture. By systematically organizing content based on user input, you're taking a crucial step away from assumption-based design and toward creating truly intuitive experiences. This methodical, evidence-driven approach is a skill that clients value highly.
Key Takeaways:
- Card sorting is a research method used to understand users' mental models and inform information architecture.
- Open card sorting is ideal for generating new content structures, while closed card sorting is used to validate existing ones.
- The process involves preparing content cards, having users group them, and analyzing the resulting patterns to define categories.
- Tools like FigJam make it easy to conduct digital card sorts, and the results can be analyzed to propose a user-centered navigation structure.
Preview of the Next Lesson:
Conducting a card sort is the first step in defining your product's structure. The output—a set of logical content groups—is the perfect input for our next task. In the upcoming lesson, we will learn how to take these categories and create a sitemap, a visual diagram that represents the complete hierarchy and structure of a website or app.