Lou Rosenfeld mentioned some interesting work coming out of BYU: Web-based Card Sorting for Information Architecture. Using Flash, mysql, and php, the researchers created an application for doing card sorts online. For anyone not familiar with the card sort, it is a tool used when organizing content. Basically, users take index cards with subjects on them and group them together. The results can help inform a site's information architecture. There have been some attempts to use technology to assist this low-tech process. IBM released a free set of tools called EZSort. I've used EZSort a couple of times. The analysis features are nice, but the end-user interface is prickly at best. The web based version mention above is similar to EZSort, but with an improved UI. Also, making it web based means that you can administer a card sort to people without them actually being there. Very cool. I didn't see a link to the actual software. Hopefully that is forthcoming.
Posted by Karl
January 7, 2003 10:04 AM