As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker.
(Note: This method works best with re-designs involving 20-60 pages. Any less and it might be easier to use pen and paper. Any more and you might want to duplicate the same method in an excel spreadsheet instead of index cards on your tabletop.)
Step 1: With your big black marker and stack of index cards in hand, go through each page in your entire website and write down the title of that page on an index card. Each page gets its own index card, and if you don’t think you’ll be able to remember what that page was for, include a short description.
Step 2: Arrange your completed cards into logical groupings. Keep the number of groups within reason, as the completed groups could potentially be your end-result sitemap.
Step 3: On a new index card, write a category name for each of the groupings you made.
Step 4: Using your camera-ready cell phone in your pocket, or any digital camera on hand take a picture of the resultant organization and consider your results.
The Card-Sort method is best utilized when similarities among your content makes it difficult to clearly divide them into categories. Because of this it’s often a good idea to have more than one person perform the Card-Sort and compare all of the results to create the new site organization and sitemap. Keep in mind that each new person performing the Card-Sort should perform Step 3 on their own with their own category names instead of re-using the categories of the first sorter.
This is a great low-tech easy way to think about re-organization and sitemaps. If this has or hasn’t worked for you in the past, throw up a comment and tell us about it.
Tags: Canada's Web Shop, Card, Card-Sort, Chris, Chris Savoie, design, Organization, Re-Design, Re-Organization, Savoie, Sitemap, Sort, TheWebShop, Tips, Tricks
