How the UX Card Sorting Technique Accelerates Web Projects

Card sorting is a well-established design-research technique extremely handy for discovering how people break down and categorize information. You can use card sorting results to group and create your web project in a way that makes the most sense to your audience.

Card sorting is useful when you want to:

  • Design a new website or section of a website
  • Find out how your customers expect to see your information grouped
  • Understand and compare how people conceptualize different concepts or items
  • Get people to rank or arrange items based on set criteria.

Card sorting involves creating a set of cards that each represent a web feature or section, and asking people to group the cards in a way that makes sense to them. You can run an open, a closed, or a hybrid card sort, depending on what you want to find out.

Open card sort: Participants sort cards into categories that make sense to them, and label each category themselves

Closed card sort: Participants sort cards into categories you give them

Hybrid card sort: Participants sort cards into categories you give them, and can create their own categories as well

The three card sorting techniques you can choose from — open, closed, and hybrid — will each tell you something different about how people understand and group your information. Choosing the right technique at the right time is key to gathering high-quality, relevant data to inform your design decisions. Since one of the goals of card sorting is to get inside the minds of the people you design for, take time to establish, recruit, and manage participants that will give you the most true-to-life data. For card sorting participants, we recommend you to download DECK UX kit:

DECK UX is a one on a kind solution for ARCHITECTING WEBSITES and PRESENTING your web projects from the user experience perspective. with DECK UX you can:

  • Create beautiful Site Maps
  • Design Multi-purpose Web Architecture
  • Stylize your UX Presentations


Creating and running a card sort is the best way to learn the technique and start using the data to improve your designs.