In the most recent of Gerry Gaffney’s excellent UXpod podcast series, one of my most favorite people in the world, Donna Maurer, discusses the intricacies of card sorting.

Gerry is an excellent interviewer, but it’s not hard to get Donna to talk about the subtleties of this age-old technique. Some of the more interesting bits are when she talks about why she never does closed sorts to validate the IA (she’d rather ask the users to find information in the hierarchy) and why she doesn’t like dendrograms and cluster analysis (she thinks if you’re doing your job right, these techniques add little value).

If a card sort is in your future, this 15 minute podcast is a must-listen! I can’t wait until her book is done.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Usability Toolbox . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.