Inviting the guests to cook the food

I received an interesting comment today, that basically said that card sorting was a ridiculous idea and akin to “inviting the guests of a restaurant to make the food in the kitchen with the cooks”. People don’t say this to me very often, but I’m sure some think it.

Now anyone who thinks that asking users about what they think is not going to buy the book, so here are the three key points about card sorting:

1. The real value in card sorting is to learn things about your users that you would not otherwise know. If you think you’ll organise your recipe website by cooking method and they think of it in terms of ingredient, you need to know this.
2. Card sorting does not provide you with an ‘answer’ to how to organise information. It gives you ideas and insight into ways you may create an information architecture.
3. You put together what you learn from other user research, your website goals and content analysis. You synthesise those things into a good, strong information architecture that works.