“Card sorting is a technique that involves asking users to organize information into logical groups.”

Card sorting is used in design to figure out users' preferences of content grouping. Card sorting can feel like a game for participants. Participants will receive a set of cards, these cards will be set to represent different elements of products such as pages, images, descriptions, and will be asked to group them in a way that makes the most sense to them. Card sorting is an early-stage process that UX designers coordinate to aid in flow and structure formatting to ensure it aligns with users' preferences.

Limitations of Card Sorting

Although card sorting can be beneficial, like many research strategies, it has its downfalls. Card sorting can provide great insight into content grouping and structure preferences but participants can and will have different ideas of best layouts and groupings. Ultimately, designers have to make the final judgment about navigation and layout structure, while also taking into account all of the research they have compiled.

“Tree testing is a type of UX architecture testing used to evaluate a proposed site structure by asking users to find items based on the website’s organization and terminology. This online test only displays the navigation links and removes any additional clutter. It is often used to validate or challenge the results of card sorting.”

Tree testing is used to validate or challenge card sorting results. Tree testing will test the accessibility, usability and findability of information on a product or website. In this test, participants will interact with a menu that displays the site map visually. Menu options will be organized by category with drop-down menu sub-categories. During this test, participants will be given tasks of finding a specific topic, phrase, or word. Participants will go through the categories in the navigation and take the route they think will best suit what they are searching for. This test will help designers understand findability within their product or site, and either better or leave the current flow.

Limitations of Tree Testing

Similar to card sorting, tree testing also has limitations. Unlike fully developed products and sites that we are used to seeing, tree tests only present users with a hierarchical navigation menu to display the content. This completely rids of additional content like imagery and descriptive text, and context clues users would otherwise get from visiting a website or using a product.

Both card sorting and tree testing are beneficial to designs when researching the most intuitive way to organize content. Card sorting allows designers to see the visual representation that users prefer when seeing content presented, while tree testing tests those users' preferences to see what best works as a whole.

Conclusion

Utilizing both of these research strategies in tandem will create better design decisions and end results. These tests allow designers to get real time feedback on user preferences and what most aligns with a user's thought process when tackling website navigation. Card sorting and tree testing are both beneficial tests on content organization and navigation structure as they help designers ensure their products or sites are easy to use and have the best accessibility, usability, and findability possible.

References

Experience UX: What is Card Sorting

Experience UX: What is Tree Testing