Optimize your information architecture with our Card Sorting UX tool

Card sorting is a UX research method where participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them. It helps designers and information architects create user-friendly navigation structures by understanding how users group and label information.

Card sorting is ideal when you are in the process of creating or restructuring an information architecture. It’s particularly useful during the early stages of design to understand user expectations and preferences for organizing content.

Card sorting helps create an effective information architecture, while tree testing is used to validate that architecture. A key benefit of card sorting is that it aids in building from scratch, whereas tree testing ensures your design is intuitive. However, card sorting may not be ideal for validating an existing structure, and tree testing can struggle to provide insights into why certain structures fail.

Tree testing is a usability technique used to evaluate the findability and information structure of a website. It involves presenting users with a 'tree' structure (a simplified navigation path) to see if they can locate specific items. Tree testing is often conducted after an initial card sorting phase to assess the effectiveness of the architecture.

Tree testing should be conducted once you have a draft of your information architecture and want to validate it with real users. It’s particularly useful for ensuring that users can easily find the content they need.

An example of card sorting would be asking users to organize different types of product categories on an e-commerce website. Tree testing could involve presenting users with a simplified navigation structure and asking them to locate where they would find a specific product or piece of information.