UX designLesson 4 of 4 in the course Interaction design

Card Sorting: Research Variants, Analysis, and Remote Methods

5 flashcards · 5 quiz questions · 5 match pairs · 5 fill-in sentences · English

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Summary

Card sorting is a research technique for discovering how people group and describe information. This lesson explains why designers use it, how a basic card sort works, and how the main variants support different research goals.

Card sorting is a knowledge elicitation technique in which participants organize items according to criteria they consider meaningful. Researchers examine the groupings to learn how people understand a domain and where their views are similar or different.

All flashcards

What is superordinate analysis in card sorting?
It identifies the overall organizing rule or principle a participant applied across a sort.
What is a similarity matrix in card-sorting analysis?
A table that records how often pairs of cards were placed together.
What is edit distance between two card sorts?
The minimum number of card moves needed to transform one sort into the other.
What does Jaccard distance compare in card-sorting analysis?
The proportion of card pairings that differ between two sorts, relative to all possible pairings.
What does orthogonality summarize in a set of card sorts?
How distinct the sorts are, using a minimum spanning tree of pairwise edit distances scaled by the number of sorts.

Quiz questions

  1. What does a dissimilarity matrix record in card-sorting analysis?Answer: How often pairs of cards were not placed together.
  2. What does multidimensional scaling do with card-sorting relationships?Answer: It represents relationships among cards in a spatial plot.
  3. Which condition distinguishes a k-clique from a k-neighbourhood around a probe sort?Answer: Every pair of sorts in the clique is also within distance kk of each other.
  4. Which trade-off is commonly associated with remote card sorting?Answer: It can reach more participants at lower cost, but offers less direct interaction.
  5. How is orthogonality calculated in card-sorting analysis?Answer: Using a minimum spanning tree of pairwise edit distances, scaled by the number of sorts.

Based on the Wikipedia article Card sorting, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Adapted into a summary, flashcards and quizzes.

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