:: TraveLite :: needs assessment :: card sorting exercise

Overview

Focus Group

Interviews

Cardsorting Exercise

Competitive Analysis

Audience Analysis

Background & Preparation

The Audience
We used nine participants to perform our card sorting exercise. Four of the sorters were all system testers and performed the card sort prior to testing the system. The other five only performed the card sort. All participants were experienced travelers.

The Terms
We used 148 terms related to travel. The terms were gathered from existing travel guides and travel information websites. We printed label sheets with the terms and stuck the labels on 1.5" x 2" index cards.

The Task
We asked users to sort the cards into as many categories as they deemed appropriate. Users could nest the terms in as many levels of hierarchy as they wished.

Analysis

Analysis
Unfortunately, we discovered after the card sort that the tool we planned to use in analyzing the results can only analyze up to 100 terms at once. Because of this, we decided to analyze the hierarchical structure by "eyeballing" the results. In order to get a sense of the term relationships, we did create a term matrix which recorded the number of times each term had been related to each other term by our users.

Since most of our needs centered around confirming or denying decisions about where specific terms should be located in our interaction flow, the term matrix turned out to be a useful tool to quickly determine which terms were related to each other.

If we were to perform a card sort again, however, we would investigate the limits of the analysis tool prior to administering the method.