Level: Advanced
Card sorting asks real users to organize content into groups that make sense to them, revealing how your actual audience thinks about your content's structure.
Open Card Sorting Reveals Natural Groupings
Letting participants create and name their own categories, rather than sorting into predefined groups, surfaces how people genuinely think about the content, without your own assumptions shaping the result.
Closed Card Sorting Validates an Existing Structure
Providing predefined categories and having participants sort content into them tests whether a proposed structure is genuinely intuitive to real users.
Patterns Across Multiple Participants Matter More Than Any Single Result
A useful card sort typically involves enough participants to identify genuine, repeated patterns rather than drawing conclusions from any single person's organization choices.
Next step: Use the SeoWolf's Notepad to document the groupings and patterns that emerge from your card sorting sessions to inform your final navigation structure.