If we go back in time, a perfect example would be a newspaper, do you remember them? They had a header that hooked you to buy it, to read the full note and even better if the one who sold the newspapers shouted the headlines, this made it more interesting to buy the newspaper because they already got the intrigue of only hearing the title of the news of the day.

Nowadays, in the digital world, attracting the attention of users works in a similar way, we need interesting content, generating interesting designs focused on the person we want to captivate so that once you are inside our site, you can find the information in an easy way.  do not waste time, time, what you are looking for quickly.

One of the activities to which you can turn if you have no idea how to prioritize the information of your website (or even outside of the digital world) is card sorting that has as main objective the analysis of results acquired by samples of people, which they perform dynamics to order information, according to the research. I have read that there are several ways to apply the card sorting, for me the base of the methodology does not change, however, what changes are the focus of the activity. Example:

Gather 5 women to know the order of priority to buy clothes online. Place cards with words such as quality, price, material, a photo of the garment, delivery time, among others; and you ask them the following:

Accomodate the cards in order of priority.  

vote for cards in order of priority.

Or simply blank cards are distributed and participants must: write as a list, in order of priority that interests them when buying a garment.

As you can see, the goal is the same, get the information organized from the point of view of the client or end user. This brings us a lot of progress for the information architecture, which I briefly tell you what it is; information architecture is the study or discipline within web design that is in charge of giving order and sequence to the information in a  coherent way, to generate a functional flow for the user of the website. As I initially told you, it happens also in the publishing world and we see it in newspapers for example.
 

I once had a project where I had to order a supermarket inventory, in certain categories, however, there were products that apparently had no category ... so I put card sorting into practice. In this particular case, my colleagues in the office helped me a lot because they are frequent online pantry shoppers, so they complied with the profile perfectly.   

I started by making labels of the categories and subcategories to create a "supermarket" later I used to post it’s for the products that had no apparent place, so I asked them to move the products (post it) to the category that they thought would be more suitable to find the product in ... mentioning something very important there is no right or wrong answer.  The plan is for the participant to feel free and not think about what we want as the correct answer. In addition, something very important is that the 8 participants of this activity passed individually and in private, to avoid that the answers were contaminated or by social pressure to give an answer that is not the one that they were really thinking.

Finally, I made a summary of the results and I got the answer, neither correct nor incorrect, but a response based on a study, with people related to the activity to be carried out, with the required profile and that mostly coincided in their response.

Personally, I enjoy moving away a bit from the computer to do this type of activities, which also allow you to evaluate gesticulation, the tone of voice, face-to-face doubts and gives you more valuable information. But if you are one of the people who prefer digital or because of logistics you need to do it remotely, there are some tools that you can use to carry out the card sorting:  Xsortapp, SimpleCardSorting, Usabilitest.

In Vauxoo we are interested in finding that extra that makes our clients the best before their competitors and explore the areas of opportunity we can offer to improve your business.