Brainstorming and Ideation with Card Sorting

Imagine this: You land on a website in search of specific information. Instead of finding it with ease, you are met with clutter, endless clicking, and no sense of direction. Frustrating, right? This is the digital equivalent of walking into a poorly organized store. When users can’t quickly find what they need, they bounce.

At Third Wunder, we’ve seen firsthand how card sorting can solve these issues—not just for organizing content, but also for brainstorming ideas, defining site features, and clustering knowledge base topics. It’s a powerful tool that helps bring clarity to complex systems and ensures that users always find what they’re looking for.

What is card sorting?

Card sorting is a method where participants use cards—often Post-it notes or digital equivalents—to sort ideas and information into categories that make sense to them. The process is simple, hands-on, and highly revealing. Participants are provided with individual cards representing different ideas, features, or topics, and they are then asked to arrange these cards into groups that feel logical to them. This exercise can be done on a table or wall if using physical cards, or through an online whiteboarding tool like FigJam or Miro for remote sessions.

The magic of card sorting lies in its ability to surface patterns in how different people think. By inviting real users or team members to categorize the content, you gain insights into how your audience mentally organizes information—essentially, it’s a sneak peek into their minds.

This helps in structuring content in ways that resonate with users, making navigation and content discovery more intuitive. It’s not just about grouping ideas; it’s about understanding the logic behind those groupings, which can lead to more user-friendly designs and better alignment with audience expectations.

There are different types of card sorting:

Open Card Sorting: Participants create their own categories. It’s perfect when you’re starting from scratch and want to understand how users naturally group information.
Closed Card Sorting: Participants are given predefined categories to sort cards into. This method works well for validating existing structures.
Hybrid Card Sorting: A mix of both open and closed, providing flexibility and room for participants to innovate within boundaries.

How card sorting supports brainstorming

Card sorting isn’t just for organizing website content—it’s a fantastic tool for brainstorming that can drive creativity and user-centric solutions. Here are some of the ways it can help:

Uncover Mental Models: Understanding how people think is key to designing experiences that feel intuitive. When users group items, they’re revealing their mental model, which provides valuable insights for structuring your content.
Generate New Category Ideas: Open card sorting can lead to innovative categories you might never have considered. It brings fresh perspectives and shows you how diverse groups of users think about your product or content.
Identify Content Gaps: Sometimes participants are left with cards they can’t categorize. This is a golden opportunity—it points to gaps in your current content, which might mean adding new resources, features, or explanations to meet user needs.
Inform Information Architecture: Card sorting provides a foundation for building intuitive navigation and user flow. You get a clear sense of how to organize information in a way that aligns with user expectations, helping ensure they find what they’re looking for without frustration.
Reveal User Priorities: How people group and label cards tells you what matters most to them. Understanding this can guide decisions about prioritizing content and features—you want to make important information as accessible as possible.
Spark Discussion: Card sorting exercises are perfect for sparking discussions among your team and participants. These conversations can lead to a deeper understanding of how to connect with your target audience.

Best practices for using card sorting in brainstorming

If you’re ready to harness the power of card sorting, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Start Early: Use card sorting at the beginning of the design process. The insights gained will set you on the right track from the outset.
Diverse Participants: Involve people with different backgrounds and experiences. Diversity brings richness to your results and helps ensure your structure resonates with a broad audience.
Data Analysis: Don’t just count how many times cards are grouped together. Look for themes, unique categorizations, and outliers. Quantitative and qualitative insights together are powerful.
Collaborative Brainstorming: Use your card sorting results to fuel team discussions. It’s one thing to see how users group content; it’s another to bring those findings into a collaborative space where new ideas can flourish.
Combine Methods: Card sorting works even better when paired with other techniques like user interviews or tree testing. This combo can validate your content structure and uncover any missed opportunities.

Getting started with card sorting

Here’s how to implement card sorting in your own projects:

Preparation: Decide whether open, closed, or hybrid card sorting best suits your goals. Gather the cards—these could be pages, topics, features, or anything else that needs organizing.
Conducting the Exercise: Card sorting can be done in person, but online tools like FigJam or Miro make it easy for remote participants too. Provide clear instructions and let users do their thing.
Analyzing Results: Look for common groupings, but also pay attention to unique takes and outliers. They often provide the most interesting insights.
Applying Insights: Once you have your results, it’s time to apply them. Update your content strategy, adjust your website’s navigation, and restructure your information architecture to align with your users’ expectations.

Real-world examples

Take, for instance, a nonprofit that used open card sorting to rethink their website. By inviting both current users and newcomers to organize the site content, they found significant gaps in how they were communicating their mission. The results led to a complete overhaul of the navigation, with new categories that better highlighted their work and drove engagement.

Or consider a mobile app that used closed card sorting to refine their feature set. By asking users to categorize features, they learned which tools were confusing or seemed redundant, leading to a simplified, user-friendly experience that increased app usage.

The impact of good UX is clear: statistics show that companies prioritizing UX design often see a 50% lower bounce rate and improved customer retention by up to 80% (source: Nielsen Norman Group). Good information architecture boosts conversion rates too—sometimes by as much as 200% (source: Forrester Research). These aren’t just numbers; they’re proof of how crucial user-centric design really is.

Final thoughts

Card sorting is a valuable tool for brainstorming and enhancing user experience. At Third Wunder, we’ve used card sorting for various purposes beyond UX design, such as brainstorming content ideas, defining site features, and clustering knowledge base topics. It plays an integral role in how we collaborate on complex systems, encouraging inclusivity and different ways of thinking.

By understanding your users’ mental models and organizing content clearly, card sorting helps your brand connect with its audience effectively. Whether you’re building a new website or refining an existing one, card sorting provides a clear path to ensure users find what they need.

Brainstorming and Ideation with Card Sorting: Create Engaging User Experiences with Post-it Notes

What is card sorting?

How card sorting supports brainstorming

Best practices for using card sorting in brainstorming

Getting started with card sorting

Real-world examples

Final thoughts

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