Card sorting and whiteboard sessions
Even if the major categories of your content organization are clear to the design team, it still may be hard to sort through where each piece of content belongs or what organization scheme will seem intuitive and predictable to your users.
Card sorting is a common technique for both creating and evaluating content organization and web site structures. In classic card-sorting techniques, index cards are labeled with the names of major and secondary content categories, and individual team members or potential site users are then asked to sort through the cards and organize them in a way that seems intuitive and logical. Users may also be asked to suggest new or better names for categories. The resulting content outline from each participant is recorded, usually in a spreadsheet, and all the individual content schemes are compared for commonalities and areas of major disagreement. The best card-sorting data comes from individual sessions with representative current or potential users of your site. If you have enough participants, combining the results of each card-sorting session produces a powerful “wisdom of crowds” aggregation of many individual judgments about what content organization makes sense.
For smaller or less formal site projects you can have group whiteboard sessions with techniques similar to card sorting. Participants are asked to sort through cards or sticky notes labeled with the names of major content elements, which are then posted on a whiteboard and sorted by the group until there is consensus about what overall organization makes the most sense. In most cases you’ll achieve quick consensus on the major categories of content and navigation, and the whiteboard organization becomes a useful first look at the site org chart that can help the group resolve the more problematic questions of what content belongs in which category.
For successful content organization sessions, make sure that you: