2020. 3. 11. 04:43ㆍ카테고리 없음
11 Card Sorting Tools To Improve Information Architecture What is Card Sorting? Updated 20/12/17: Online card sorting is a that helps categorise your webpages by identifying how visitors would expect to find content or functionality. Online card sorting is a quick and simple way of evaluating your information architecture, workflow, menu structure or user navigation journeys.
Card sorting tools ask users to organise topics into categories and may involve them naming these groups. Card sorting is sometimes used after a (or reverse card-sorting) exercise identifies findability problems with current navigation journeys. Evaluates how easy it is to find an item by getting participants to solely use the website’s navigation (i.e. Without any use of internal search or other navigation aids) to complete a set task. Card sorting using online solutions allows you to quickly identify how customers group topics together. How Does Online Card Sorting Work?
The card sorting online provider will recruit a sample of people who are roughly representative of your target audience or customer base. Participants are then asked to organise topics into categories that they feel make sense. They may also be asked to label these groups to ensure the words you use are what users would expect. Source: Benefits of Card Sorting Online: Online card sorting tools allow you to understand your user’s expectations and their comprehension of your topics. Further, when we discuss our websites internally we often unconsciously use jargon and words that are not generally used outside our organisations to describe aspects of our websites.
Knowing how people groups and describe topics can help you:. Organise the structure of your website.
Inform what content to put on your homepage. Label categories and navigation. Identify how different groups of users view and organise the same topics Limitations of Online Card Sorting: It does not make allowance for users’ tasks. Card sorting is a content-centric process and if used without considering users’ tasks it can lead to an information structure that is not usable when dealing with real tasks. Make sure you evaluate the output from a card sorting exercise by discussing the potential impact on key user tasks.
It can be superficial as participants may not fully consider what the content is about or how they would use it to complete a task. Card sorting results may also vary widely between participants or they may be fairly consistent.
Ensure you don’t rely on too small a sample of users to reduce the risk of a few participants overly influencing your results. Card sorting online tools should be used to inform your decision making and be viewed alongside other research and usability testing to ensure it is used appropriately. For example you might want to consider (reverse card sorting) to evaluate the findability of items in your navigation structure to validate your card sorting findings. Like any research technique card sorting tools cannot tell you exactly how users will respond on a live website. For this reason it is wise to first if they risk having an impact on key success metrics. Open and Closed Card Sorting: Open card sorting involves participants being asked to organise topics into groups that make sense to them and then give a name to each of these groups that best describes its content. This is great for understanding how users’ group content and the terms or labels they apply to each category.
Closed card sorting is where users are asked to sort topics using pre-defined categories. This is normally used once you have clearly defined your main navigation or content categories and need to understand how users organise content items into each category. Often organisations use a combination of the two methods to firstly identify content categories and then to validate how well the category labels work in a closed card sort. Below I have summarised 7 of the top online (remote) card sorting tools and 4 software solutions for using off-line. Online Card Sorting Tools: Online card sorting solutions allow for remote user testing so that you can save on the cost of a lab and it allows participants to conduct the test in the safety of their natural browsing environment. Remote user testing can also be incredibly quick as participants can be recruited online and asked to complete the study almost immediately.
Here are seven online card sorting tools summarised for you to consider. An additional four offline cards sorting solutions are summarised below the online tools. Discover how real people think your content should be organised and obtain user insights to make informed decisions about information architecture. Priced at start from $109 per month, $149 per survey or $990 for an annual subscription. A new online card sorting solution that is in Beta and is currently free for users to try it out.
Add or import your cards, add a survey and test your card sort before you launch the exercise. Email your participants a unique URL and you can view results immediately. The UI allows you to analyse data using industry standard tables or download your data to analyse as you wish. Online card sorting with the ability to turn on subgroups to capture multiple levels of card placement. This PRO feature allows users to drag one grouping of cards into another grouping. An additional PRO feature offers participant replay which logs every decision made by users and logs each time they sort a card, create a new group or rename an existing group.
Xsort Free Card Sorting Application For Mac
Free demo-account allows you to try out the service with a simple card sort. A Basic subscription starts at $49 for 30 days or $99 for the Pro 30 day plan. Online card sorting tool that supports closed, open and hybrid testing. Offers a no-obligation Free 3-day trial with all features available for your evaluation. Provides a Prioritization Matrix tool that helps rank tasks by a frequency and importance criteria. This can help identify which issues are of most importance and give priority to resolve first. A full-service supplier of usability research, has been established for over 25 years and will design, manage and analyse the result of your card sorting research for you.
They offer both open and closed card-sorting solutions for you. Card sorting is just one of the tools in their impressive UX suite. Supports open and closed card-sorts, and randomisation of cards and categories. Offers a 14 day Free trial and you can obtain a price quote by submitting your details using a. Offers clients a full usability suite, including web-based card sorting. Supports up to 100 items and 12 categories. Supports open and closed card-sorts, randomisation of questions to reduce participant bias, and follows a responsive design so participants can take studies on either their desktop or iPad.
Using an iPad makes the process more of an intuitive experience by harnessing the power of touch-screen technology. UserZoom is Ideal if you are a large organisation looking for a comprehensive usability testing programme, including information architecture/UX design, benchmarking and market research. For businesses subscriptions start from $19,000 a year. Off-Line Card Sorting Tools: If you prefer to conduct card sorting offline with users you have recruited locally there are a number of free software solutions available to use. Summarised below are four free card sorting software tools you can use. This is a free open-sourced card sorting software that you can download onto a computer running Windows (Windows 7 is preferred). It allows you to import a list of cards using Word or Excel and the software enables you to sort up to 1,000 cards.
Users click and drag cards into pre-set categories and you can view results using real-time reporting. Data can be exported and merged, with each participant’s data presented and exported individually. The software does allow you to aggregate results and run a cluster analysis. The reporting uses a dendrogram or family tree to present results.
However, the software is not for everyone as it requires basic knowledge of SQL databases because installation includes SQL Compact. However, the site does provide a step-by-step installation guide to help you complete the process. 9.: This is a free DIY card sorting tool which uses open-source Mozilla based software which is compatible with Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The software allows you to create open sorting and closed sorting projects where participants drag topic options into the category blocks. For closed sorting you can disable the feature that allows respondents to add new labels. The software only runs in Mozella and you will need to download the UzCardSort software library. The analysis is more limited than some of the cloud-based solutions but the developers plan to release new features over time.
This is a free open source card sorting software solution that works on Windows or Apache web servers and on Unix systems running Apache. The software creates a Java applet that provides an interactive user experience where participants clicks and drags items from a list to one of several category bins.
Labels can be moved back and forth between bins until the participant is happy with the outcome and submits their choices for analysis. The project manager can view collected data using the integrated clustering algorithm and interactive tree. The reporting tool also includes a link to the raw data, subject by category results and a table of any verbatim comments from respondents. This is a free card sorting tools designed for Macintosh. The tool offers both open and closed sorting, plus a combination of the two. The software simulates a table with cards on it so that participants can click and drop cards into the relevant category. It also allows respondents to create sub-categories if needed which can be useful for developing drop down menus.
The reporting functionality allows you to view results in real-time and export data if required. The developers plan a web-based version of the software to allow participants to respond to studies without having to be on a Macintosh.
Finally: Many of these online card sorting tools offer a free trial or demo so don’t let cost put you off trying out card sorting to improve your information architecture. This is such important element of the user experience don’t leave it all to chance. Get some input from real users.
You should also seriously consider using to validate card sorting results and evaluate the findability of categories or products on your site. Thank you for reading my post.
I hope you found this post useful and if you did please share using the social media links on this page. You can view my full. I also have a. To browse links to.
About the author: Neal provides digital marketing optimisation consultancy services and has worked for brands such as, Foxybingo.com, partypoker.com and Bgo.com. He uses a variety of techniques, including web analytics, personas, customer journey analysis and customer feedback to improve a website’s conversion rate. Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on. As an ex-market research and insight manager he also had posts published on the research website. If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to. You can follow Neal on Twitter, see his or connect on.
There might be no such thing as a free lunch but thanks to the wonders of Open Source software, freeware and trial software there most certainly is such a thing as free software. Here is a list of over 50 great free UX tools covering the following areas: Project tools describes itself as the first company-wide UX knowledge platform. It’s a bit like for UXers, with the ability to create online personas and user stories, easily share wireframes, mockups and other UX assets, along with code and styling information for UI components. You can set-up a free team account with unlimited users, up to 3 projects and 5GB of storage. Prototyping tools is another online UI prototyping tool and like LucidChart it’s not fee but does allow you to create simple single pages for free using the trial version (just click on the launch demo link). It has an intuitive UI and comes with a good set of sketchy widgets to use.
Pages can be downloaded as a PDF or an image. Is a web based collaboration and prototyping tool. It allows you to upload designs and then add hotspots to quickly create an interactive prototype. It can create both web and mobile prototypes and as well as being integrated with Dropbox has lots of nice collaboration features such as annotations and feedback capture, live notifications and being able to see the design history for a screen and project.
The free version allows you to set-up 2 projects. Is a web based tool for creating mobile app wireframes and prototypes.
It provides a drag and drop interface for building mobile app mock-ups and comes with large library of ready-made iOS, Android and Windows UI widgets for smartphone and tablet. A free account allows you to create 1 project with up to 10 pages. Describes itself as the world’s leading prototyping, collaboration and workflow platform. Given that it claims to be used over 1 million designers then this easy to believe. InVision allows you to easily create interactive prototypes by adding hotspots to uploaded designs and provides lots of great collaboration and presentation features, including annotations, tracked feedback and project updates.
It has lots of cool features like automatic syncing and user testing capture (which of course don’t come for free) and is probably the slickest prototyping tool currently out there. A free account allows you to set-up just the 1 project. Is an online tool for creating diagrams, UI mockups and prototypes. It allows more than one person to collaborate on a document and comes with a nice set of built-in widgets, including UI components, icons and diagramming shapes. Although it’s not strictly speaking free it does allow documents to be created with up to 60 elements and with two collaborators for free. Documents can be saved and downloaded as a webpage, PDF or image.
Allows you to create interactive web, tablet and mobile prototypes from imported screen designs. You can automatically synch Photoshop PSDs through DropBox and even capture feedback from clients and colleagues within the tool. A free account allows you to create as many projects as you want, but Marvel branding will appear in the prototypes. Provide a suite of online design and prototyping tools. These include for creating wireframes; for sharing and reviewing designs with your team; for planning and organising application development;, a development platform to code, manager and host static websites; for annotating designs; for creating annotated banners and slideshows in HTML5 and, a web-based publishing tool for creating brochures and other design documents.
A free account gives you basic access to all the apps, but only 1 project per app and with some project restrictions. Is open source’s answer to. It includes, a word processor; a spreadsheet tool;, that can be used to create PowerPoint like prototypes and for creating diagrams, images and graphics. It’s obviously not as slick as its commercial cousin but then it is free! Is Facebook’s free prototyping tool. It allows you to create desktop, tablet and mobile prototypes using imported screens and components.
It supports a wide range of interactions, such as scrolling, swiping, tapping and dragging as well as common design patterns, such as slide in navigation. You can create links between layers in your or file and even export snippets of animation code that can be used in the finished app or website. Is a nice little Open Source tool for creating prototypes, UI mockups, and UX diagrams, such as user journeys. It comes with a good set of built-in widgets covering web, windows and sketchy UI components and allows pages to be exported as HTML, a PDF, an Open Office doc, a Word Doc or an image. Is a mobile prototyping tool that allows you to build mobile prototypes that run as native apps.
There is both a PC and Mac version and like most mobile prototyping tools you create a prototype from design components that you import into the tool. Pixate has now joined the growing family of Google tools, so expect more features to be added in the future.
You can download the application for free, but using any of the collaboration features requires a paid account (starting at $5 a month). Is a powerful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) UI editor, allowing you to create UI prototypes and mockups, and to link these in with user flows and business process diagrams. Unfortunately the free edition (community edition) only allows you to modify some existing sample projects. Is a powerful drag and drop website builder. It claims that you can use it to design and launch responsive websites without writing code and now supports not only static websites, but CMS driven dynamic websites as well. A free account allows you to build 1 website, but this will include Webflow branding.
Is another drag and drop website builder that allows you to quickly create responsive websites, prototypes and apps. It’s newer to the game than and doesn’t yet have so many bells and whistles, but looks very promising. A free account will mean that you’ll have to display the Weld branding for sites (at the bottom) and limits the number of projects and pages within a project. Design tools is a great little tool for those instances when you want to grab an onscreen colour.
A magnifier makes grabbing the right pixel dead easy and it will give you the web colour along with Hex and RGB values. ColorPic even allows you to build up palettes of colours so you don’t have to keep grabbing the same colours. Is a great little website offering free vector graphics. All the images on the site are free to use for personal use and most of them can even be used commercially. (which sounds a bit kinky but is actually short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source graphics tool.
It’s certainly not in the same league as but is none the less very useful for all manner of graphic and design related tom foolery. Does what it says on the tin and is really useful for generating dummy text for designs. You can generate Lorem Ipsum for a specific number of paragraphs, words or sentences. Allows you to set-up custom dashboards to track online content such as blogs, RSS feeds and photo feeds. It’s useful for keeping in touch with what’s going on with your favourite UX websites and for getting inspiration for new designs. Describes itself as a visual discovery tool that you can use to find ideas for all of your projects and interests.
It’s a great way to not only get design inspiration but also to keep a track of great designs you find and to share things like design patterns with others. User research tools is a fantastic app for keeping track of notes, information, photos, artefacts and anything else that you want to store and keep track of. It’s a great way to maintain a digital repository of stuff for a project and because you can sort your notes into notebooks and add tags, it’s very easy to organise your notes and to retrieve information. A free Evernote account allows you to create as many notes as you like but you’ll need to pay for something of the more advanced features such as saving emails, being able to search attachments and annotating PDFs.
Is a qualitative analysis tool from. It allows you to add notes from user interviews and user testing sessions and to include tags and a significance rating so that you can easily identify themes, retrieve key information and generally slice and dice your data. Reframer is currently in beta and is completely free at the moment. Is a great tool for capturing, organising and tracking tasks and information. It allows you to create cards and boards to help track and organise your stuff, be it tasks, research insights or simply ideas.
You can even use Trello for. Set-up a board, add your cards and then ask people to sort them into either their own categories (for an open sort) or pre-existing categories (for a closed sort). You can create as many boards as you want with a free account so you can sort and organise your stuff to your heart’s content. User testing tools is an Open Source application that allows you to record what’s going on onscreen, including audio from a microphone or the computer speakers. It even allows you to capture a webcam video feed as well so it’s a great tool for recording usability testing sessions. Videos are saved as AVI files and can also be converted into streaming Flash videos (SWFs). It allows you to quickly capture user feedback by capturing where users would click on an image (such as a mock-up or screengrab) to carry out a task.
For example, adding an item to the basket. Chalkmark allows you to set-up a project with up-to 3 tasks, and capture up-to 10 responses for free. Is a great tool for capturing first impressions for a design, or for perhaps carrying out some quick A/B testing. You can have one or more designs, in the form of images and then people are able to view them for 5 seconds before entering some feedback. Is a free video conferencing tool that is great for communicating, collaborating and also remote user testing. It’s a great way to run remote user testing sessions and even supports remote desktop control so you can run a prototype locally and invite participants to take control of your computer to use it.
Nice one Google. Is an online meeting tool that is not only free (with some restrictions), but also supports screen sharing and remote desktop control so it’s great for remote user testing. The free version lets you set-up an unlimited number of meetings with up-to 10 participants and voice over IP, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to pay to be able to record sessions and to allow participants to use their phone for audio. Is a great tool for carrying out.
You basically set-up some tasks for people to do on a website and let them try them out at their own convenience. Loop11 is not free but does allow you to set-up a trial test with a maximum of 5 tasks and 2 questions. Is ideal for remote user testing and is now one of the slickest remote meeting tools out there.
Unfortunately participants do need to install the Skype client on their computer and it won’t record sessions like, but then you can always use something like to do this. Is another great UX tool from.
Treejack allows you to test an information architecture (IA) by carrying out ‘reverse card sorting’. You upload your IA, which might be the site structure or a taxonomy used then ask users where they would go to find something within a clickable navigation tree of your IA (see screenshot). The free version of Treejack allows you to test up to 3 tasks with up to 10 participants. Survey tools is a great way to quickly create online surveys. It’s a little bit limited when compared to the and of the world but what do you expect given that it’s free?
Allows you to capture in-product video feedback from your users. Users reply to questions (such as “How was your setup experience?”) and can record in-product feedback videos with their screen and microphone. You can target specific pages and because Plot uses fancy technology users don’t even have to install any software to provide feedback. Plot is free for your first 1,000 visitors a month. Is an online survey tool that’s great for carrying out online surveys, or for capturing feedback following usability testing. The free version allows you to set-up surveys with up to 10 questions and 100 responses, which is generally plenty.
Xsort Free Card Sorting Application For Mac 2017
Is my go-to online survey tool. It’s a bit more powerful than SurveyMonkey and has good support for delivering surveys on desktop, tablet and mobile.
The free version allows for unlimited surveys, questions and responses (unlike Survey Monkey), although you do have to put up with SurveyGimzo branding. The free version also doesn’t allow you to use some of the more advanced question types (like drag and drop for ranking), or survey logic, but you can hardly complain at that. Specialises in mobile surveys.
You can quickly build very slick surveys for mobile and tablet, with skip logic and even different end screens depending on the responses. A free account allows you to create an unlimited number of surveys, with all of the questions types available. However you are limited to a rather miserly 20 responses per month with a free account. Annotation tools is of course Adobe’s free PDF viewer. Not only can it be used to view PDFs but it can also be used to add annotations to a PDF. Very useful for letting others add comments to wireframes, sketches and visuals that you care to share as a PDF.
Allows you to capture and share annotations for webpages, including screenshots, comments and highlighted text. You can set-up a group for sharing information so it’s a nice tool for capturing comments for designs and for sharing things like design patterns. Is a great little tool that allows you to add post-it type notes to a prototype in order to capture feedback. You simply add a little bit of JavaScript to each page of the prototype and Protonotes does the rest.
Is of course Microsoft’s replacement for Internet Explorer – the much loathed ugly step sister of web browsers, and comes free with. Not only is a much better browser than its predecessor, but it also allows you to annotate web pages. You can easily add notes, scribbles and highlights to websites which comes in handy for everything from competitive reviews to expert evaluations. Card sorting tools is an from. It allows you to carry out closed card sorting where by participants sort items into predefined categories and open card sorting where by participants can choose their own categories.
OptimalSort is a great way to find out how a site (or set of information) might be structured and allows studies with up to 30 cards and up to 10 participants for free. Is a new online card sorting tool. Like OptimalSort the tool allows for both open and closed card sorts and has an intuitive drag and drop interface. A pre and post survey can be set and results can be analysed through a range of filters and results views.
The tool is currently in Beta (until 1st Jan 2018) and will offer a free subscription with limited results collection after that. Screen grab tools is a free Open Source web app that allows you to find out how a webpage will look in lots of different browsers.
It gives you screenshots for each browser and along with the usual suspects such as IE, Firefox and Chrome it also includes some really obscure ones, such as,. Is a great little screen capture tool. It allows you to quickly grab a full web page, the visible part of a web page or just part of a webpage and works with all the major browsers. Screengrabs can copied to the clipboard and exported as an image or PDF. The free version is fully functional, although you have to pay for more advanced features such as adding annotations and exporting to another program. Allows you to easily capture and share screen grabs and videos from onscreen.
It’s great for capturing dynamic interactions and behaviours and allows you to export videos as a streaming Flash video (SWF) that anyone can play in their browser. Is a great free screen grab tool that allows you to easily take a screen shot of the entire screen, the active window or just a selection of the screen. Screen grabs can be automatically exported to a directory and can be saved in a variety of formats. Sitemapping tools is an online diagramming tool that allows you to quickly create sitemaps, flowcharts and even wireframes.
It’s build with collaboration in mind so you can collaborate in real-time with other people and it even integrates with common tools such as,. A free account allows you to create up to 5 public diagrams and collaborate with 3 other people in real-time. Is a really nice mind mapping tool that’s great for building site maps; for collating information; and for generally capturing thoughts and feedback. Mind maps can be imported from other mind mapping applications such as and and can be exported or shared with others by uploading them to the.
Is an Open Source mind mapping tool that’s really useful for creating clickable HTML sitemaps. It’s not as slick as some of the other mind mapping tools out there but is very quick to use and has more features than the free edition of. Analytics tools is not only free but also incredibly useful for finding out how a site is being used. You can find out loads of interesting stuff such as the paths visitors are commonly taking and where visitors are entering and exiting a site. It even allows you to carry out A/B testing.
Is a tool that allows you to view a visual heatmap of clicks on a web page, showing hot (lots of clicks) and cold (few clicks) zones. It’s great for finding out where visitors are clicking on pages, although it does require a bit of technical know how to get it installed and working for a site. Accessibility tools is a Firefox plugin that’s really useful for checking the accessibility of web pages.
Is an (X)HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spell checker, and a broken links checker all rolled into one. Any other tools? Is there a free UX tool that you use missing from the list? Let me know by and I’ll get it added to the list.