#ux technique

I’m not actually sure when is the perfect time to do card sorting in a project. In the case of the project i’m working on, it was in the middle of the development when we did a card sorting. It was sort of a preparation for the next release (version 3).

Since the project is practicing its “Agile Process”, we can’t control the changes in the application sprint after sprint. With all the ideas and suggestions, our site now holds quite a lot of information and definitely automated a lot of things but it wasn’t user-friendly anymore. Our site map itself became too complicated. And so, the card sorting idea happened.

Not familiar with card sorting? Here’s a informative link for you: CLICK HERE

Grouped together are the developers, testers, BA, PM, and the Scrum Master of the project. Other users were scheduled in a different time to not conflict them with the card sorting decision of the team. The team is flexible to practice other roles. But this time, we should be in the role where we had a lot of experience with in the project. I fall in the developer side here. It was definitely hard not to be biased while sorting the cards into its categories.

Basically, we created groups that serves as the main pages of the site and written on the individual cards are the features available in the site. As much as possible, We must group these features into its respective main pages (groups) according to where they were expected to be rather than to where they are now based on the site we’ve created.

This process took us quite some time before we were able to group all the features together. Discussing each and every feature before placing them into groups. Like to what is the feature about? Does this feature makes sense at all or does it just make things complicated? And so forth..

With this activity, it somehow helped turn the messed-up site map into a clean and organized site map.  

Pardon for the intentional blurry parts of my photo above. Due to my colleagues privacy and the company’s rules, I had no choice but to blur them out. The main purpose of this photo is to provide an example on how card sorting works.