Here at WebSort, we have the chance to take part in a lot of great initiatives and endeavors. Recently, we had the opportunity to work with the designers at Sunlight Labs, “an open-source community … focused on the digitization of government data and … making government websites easily accessible” (read more).
Having slogged through more than my fair share of government websites in the last few years, I decided to take a quick look at some of the projects done by Sunlight Labs. Their proposed redesign of the U.S. Supreme Court website was impressive enough that I was happy to involve WebSort with their work in tackling a behemoth of a government entity – the FCC.
Talk about a mountain of information to organize – the Federal Communications Commission’s main page has enough text links and upper level data categories to make your head spin. No wonder the folks at Sunlight Labs wanted to start with a card sort to help them create an organization that would actually make sense to the user.
To read about the results of their card sort, you can check out their full post here. But I’ll go ahead and quote one of my favorite parts:
Before any organization embarks on a card sorting exercise they should go through their content to get rid of the excess, make sure everything is understandable to a user, and combine content areas that are similar in nature. Doing this first will make it easier for the people participating in the card sorting and will mean less time spent analyzing the final data.
We’ll definitely be posting more about this soon, as preparing to do a card sort is as important as doing the sort itself. Because, as with many things, you get out what you put into it. But even without having a strict methodology to follow, simply taking the time to thoughtfully try to weed out redundancies, artificially similar wordings, and ambiguous terms can go a long way in making the results of a card sort a lot more useful.
