When should I use a card sort?

The Card sort gives respondents a set of items and asks them to group them into categories. It answers how people naturally cluster the things you are trying to organise, in their own terms.

Card sort is an advanced research method, available on Core and Pro.

When to reach for it

Reach for a card sort when you are designing a structure: a new section, a navigation rebuild, or a set of category names you are not sure about. It shows you which items belong together and what people would call each group.

If the structure already exists and you want to know whether people can find things in it, a Tree test is the better fit. Card sorts are for the design phase, tree tests for the validation phase. The two are the information-architecture blocks, and they often run in sequence.

Good to know

A card sort can be open or closed. In an open sort, respondents make up their own category names, which surfaces the words they would use. In a closed sort, you give the categories in advance and they only decide what goes in each, which tests whether your categories hold up. You choose which one in the editor.