Card Sorting: How to organize information in an eCommerce

A perfect example of card sorting would be the newspapers, do you remember them? They had a heading that hooked you to buy it so that you could read the full note, and it was much better if the person who sold them shouted the heading of the day, this made it more interesting to acquire it because you already had the intrigue of what it was about just by listening to the heading of the day.

Nowadays, in the digital world, attracting the attention of users works similarly, we need content of interest, designed for the person you want to captivate so that once they are inside the website can find the information easily, it does not waste their time, and they will find what they are looking for quickly.

One of the activities that you can resort to if you have no idea on how to prioritize your eCommerce information (or even non-digital information) is card sorting.

The main objective of card sorting is the analysis of results acquired by a sample of people, who perform dynamics to sort information, according to the research. There are several ways to apply card sorting, for me the base of the methodology does not change, however, what changes are the focus of the activity. Example:

You bring together 5 people to know the order of priority of shopping for clothes online. Place cards with words such as quality, price, material, photo of the garment, delivery time, among others; and you ask them the following:

If you notice, the objective is the same, to obtain the information organized from the point of view of the client or end-user. 

This gives us progress for information architecture, which deals with the study or discipline within web design that is responsible for ordering and sequencing information in a coherent way, to generate a functional flow for the website user. 

On one occasion I had a project where I had to order a supermarket inventory, in certain categories, however, there were products that had no apparent category ... So I put card sorting into practice. In this particular case, my colleagues at the office were very helpful as they are frequent online pantry shoppers, so they fit the bill perfectly.

I began by making labels for the categories and subcategories to create a “supermarket”. Later, post-its were made with the products that had no apparent place, so I asked them to move on to place the products (post it) in the category that they would like or seems more appropriate to find the product ... mentioning something very important there is no right or wrong answer. The plan is that the participant feels freedom and is not thinking about what we want as the correct answer. 

In addition, something very important is that the 8 participants of this activity passed individually and in private, to avoid that the answers were contaminated or due to social pressure, an answer was given that is not what they were really thinking.

Finally, a summary of the results was made and the answers were obtained, neither correct nor incorrect, but a response based on a study, with people related to the activity to be carried out, with the required profile and who mostly agreed in their answer.

Conclusion

The order of the information in any product is the key for the user to keep their attention on it. Nowadays, the interaction of people with technology has made us impatient, so when the information is usually very complicated or confusing, the user abandons the product.

Personally, I really enjoy getting away from the computer a bit to do this type of activity, which also allows you to evaluate gestures, tone of voice, face-to-face doubts and gives you more valuable information. But if you are one of the people who prefer digital or for logistics reasons you need to do it remotely, there are some tools that you can use to perform card sorting:   Xsortapp, SimpleCardSorting, Usabilitest..