Card Sorting

For UM Interactive Media website

Examine user preferences for grouping, labeling, and placement of items on the UM Interactive Media website and redesign.

Introduction

An open card sort study was conducted to inform navigational design for UM Interactive media website. This study included of 6 participants who were all provided with 43 list of items and were instructed to group and label them as per their preferences. The participants were not disclosed of the information that the list of items belong to the UM website and were advised to not rush through the study and take their time to carefully consider the items to be sorted. During the study each participant was interviewed individually and remotely to observe their actions. This study has provided me with quality data which then helped me generate an improved and efficient redesign of the UM website.

Procedure

  • In the beginning, the participants were explained the purpose of the study and what is required of them. There were also encouraged to think out loud while sorting the items in order for the moderator to better understand the participants choice of action.

  • During the study, the participants were asked to sort 43 list of items into groups and name each group as best suited. Once they were done sorting all the items and clicked “Finished”, each participant was directed to a questionnaire which collected their demographics using 17 questions out of which 10 questions were answered by everyone, but the remaining 7 questions were only accessible if the Answer chosen for Q.10 was “Yes”.

  • At the end of the session, the participants were thanked for their time and participation in the study and for provided their feedback which will be very useful in determining the best suitable way to organize the content and create a useful redesign of the website.

Equipments

  • Optimal Workshop

    Designed and conducted the card sort study and analysis

  • Zoom

    Participants remotely interviewed and moderated

  • Excel

    Generated graphs and calculated data

  • Miro

    Generated site map

  • Figma

    For website redesign

  • PowerPoint

    For presenting the report

List of Cards Used

Participants Demographics

MALE

FEMALE

Analysis

Most common sorting strategies of Labels and it’s cards across participants

  • Program Info

  • Application

  • International Students

  • Career Opportunities

  • Faculty

  • Amenities

Using Optimal Workshop to collect and analyze data of the categories and Labels created by the participants


Dendrogram (Tree Diagram)

6 groups from Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA)

When we set the agreement to 50%, there are 9 groups As shown in the diagram, at 67% the desired set of groups were identified with best suited relationships between similar sets of data

  • International Students

  • News & Support

  • Faculty

  • Program Information

  • Application

  • Career Opportunities

Distance Matrix across participants - 43 Cards

In the blue box, these list of items are paired by 50-100% of the participants. These items are best described and split into 2 groups by majority of the participants – “program information” and “program application”

In the green box, all items show a very strong relation between each other. This similarity between items paired by participants helps generate a User centered design for webpage navigation groupings

5 Groups from the Matrix

  1. Program application

  2. Program Information

  3. International students

  4. Job/Internship/Career

  5. Faculty

Observations

  • Using a non-directive and cautious study approach, many of the participants took sometime to figure out that the 43 items list was a part of a school/college website which influenced their task completion time.

  • Some participants sorted their items based on keywords and also used the same words to label groups; i.e., “Application”, “International students”, “Faculty”, “Career/job”.

  • All the participants ended up reshuffling a lot of items within groups after they were placed in their initial groupings and when asked why they decided to make the changes all responded about their dissatisfaction of the groupings and how they can arrange it better groups.

  • Most of the participants took ample amount of time to carefully sort out items that provided Program’s Information in relation to items that mentioned anything related to applying.

  • Groupings that were found similar across participants were: “Program Information, Application, Career Opportunities, Faculty, International Students”. Remaining of the items were much more clustered across participants as each of them had a different arrangement set up for those items.

  • All the participants had difficulty placing some same list of items across created group which then made then generate a new category entirely – some labelled it as amenities, some as student support, some as student news and some as Get Involved.

Results

Site map

Redesign

Final Design

The final design incorporated a user-centered navigation structure that reflected the preferences and mental models of the target audience. The new navigation was more intuitive, making it easier for users to find the information they needed quickly.

Success Metrics: The redesigned navigation significantly improved the usability of the UM Interactive Media website, as indicated by user feedback and usability testing. Users were able to find information faster and with less effort compared to the previous structure.

Reflections: This project underscored the importance of understanding user mental models when designing navigation systems. The card sorting exercise proved to be an invaluable tool in aligning the website’s structure with user expectations.