Card sorts

Overview

The way people categorise objects or concepts varies between individuals. Sometimes people aren’t even aware of how they categorise objects or concepts until you get them to think about it.

Sorting is a powerful way of discovering how individual people categorise things, and how much agreement and disagreement there is between individuals.

You can ask people to sort real objects like mobile phones or rock samples, and there are advantages in using the real thing if touch or smell are key features. But cards showing an image or text are much more manageable and are suitable for most purposes.

In a card sort each card shows a picture, or text such as a product name. Each card is given an identifying number.

We ask people to sort the cards repeatedly into groups (categories) of their own choice, using their own criteria. For each different criterion, we record which cards are in which category, using the identifying numbers on each card.

Advantages

•Cards are cheap and easy to produce, versatile and easy to manage.

•Cards showing images can be sorted by people who speak a different language to the researcher, or by people who can’t read, or can’t speak.

•Using numerals to identify cards means that recording and analysis can be done by someone who has no idea what’s being sorted. So card sorts can be used for sensitive topics, confidentiality can be safeguarded and researcher bias reduced.