UX designers love fun group activities that help organize information as well surface ideas that might be no so obvious. Card sorting is one of these activities.

Card sorting is a group activity used in Information Architecture (IA) and UX design to organize content and features for a website or application. It can be used to improve navigation, structure, and findability of content or features for existing and new products.

Cart sorting doesn’t require much explanation and thus often done with stakeholders as well as target users.

Card sorting can be done with paper cards. There is a certain amount of magic that happens when people get in the same room and move physical cards around.

Of course that is not always possible, and there are digital card sorting tools that allow teams to collaborate remotely.

There are 2 common variations of card sorting: open and closed.

Open Card Sorting

In open card sorting participants are given cards each representing a piece of content or functionality, and participants organize cards into categories and label each category. This is a great way to uncover the relationships of the items, and mental models of the participants.

Open card sorting works especially well for brand new projects.

Closed Card Sorting

In closed card sorting facilitator defines categories, and asks participants to place cards into existing categories. Closed card sorting is a great way to build on or improve existing Information Architecture.

Card sorting typically results in a sitemap. But can also be used to categorize materials on the website and to create navigation.