Used for assessing and designing the navigation and structure of a website or app. In card sorting, participants are presented with a list of items (for example, all the products featured in an online supermarket) and they’re asked to group the items in a way that makes the most logical sense.

All of this will hopefully create an easier, more logical way of navigating your site. You can validate your card sorting results by using tree testing (see further down the page).

There are three types of card sort:

• Open card sort: participants are asked to group cards into categories that makes sense to them, and then they label each category in a way that they feel accurately describes the content.
• Closed card sort: participants sort cards into category groups that you’ve already labelled and defined. For example, this is handy if you’re launching a new page for ‘watches’ and you’re not sure whether to put it under a parent category ‘Accessories’ or ‘Jewellery’.
• Hybrid card sort: this is a mixture of open and closed. Participants can sort cards into categories you’ve already defined and then create their own categories if they think your categories are inaccurate.