Card Sorting for Better UX Decisions

I went to school for User Experience and Interface design. I studied under Chris Becker whose ideas continue to inspire me today. That academic approach taught me the value of user empathy as a foundation for Human-Centered Computing (HCC).

Back then, I drew out empathy maps, executed presentation-ready user personas, and crafted ‘Insight Statements’ that feel right at home in the Agency environment. However, when you’re working in the real world — and on a real world budget — I learned very quickly that engineer-led companies consider much of that creative process … “artsy stuff.” Therefore, it’s up to me to demonstrate where those foundational exercises can improve the finished product.

This week, I had that experience. And it was glorious.

The creative team was vacillating over the report filters for our additional reporting options. We needed a solution that allowed users to filter their results by not only the Domain of the seller, but also the individual sellers at those sites. Here’s what we knew about our users to inform our decisions:

• Not all users were excited about the “additional clutter” of those 3rd party sellers at sites like Amazon/Walmart/etc.
• Other users absolutely needed those additional sellers to see how they were affecting price changes
• Some users did not care about “Sold by Amazon.com” as much as they cared about a particular 3P seller — usually the manufacturer’s own Amazon store
• Several of our users requested to see how these sellers behaved across the multiple platforms that they sell (e.g. pricing practices on their own direct site vs selling on a Walmart or Amazon Marketplace)

After discussion around “how do they want to filter” and “can’t we just say ‘show all’?” I stopped the hypotheticals. I opened a whiteboard in our Zoom chat and started typing in Seller names:

The questions we needed answered were how would our users think to narrow down the types of sellers they wanted in the price results. So while I drafted up the options, we discussed the four scenarios someone would want to configure in the reports:

The benefits of the card sorting exercise in the Zoom whiteboard tool is every seller I named was its own entity on the whiteboard for anyone on the call to grab and move. It worked great!

Do users want to select from a Marketplace Retailer first, and if they do, where should direct sellers go?

Are we over thinking it? Should users just select the retailers they need out of a list of potentially 147 marketplace retailers, 1P sellers, and 3P sellers alike? Like a Seller Soup?

We added search bars to demonstrate if you wanted all of Amazon and its sellers, or if you wanted just Joel’s TVs across all marketplaces and direct sellers.

And we ran through all four scenarios listed above to see how the user would accomplish their goals.

In options 3 and 4, we’re looking at keeping the one big Seller Soup. The toggle gives the user control to show 3P sellers or only shows direct sellers.

But we were still not ready to give up the idea of two cascading or hierarchical filters yet. So we played with the Direct Retailers as the first selection, and the 3P sellers as the second option.

But ultimately, we’re taking this version to the users for User Acceptance Testing:

And within the week, the UX team had mocked up a high fidelity version of the user experience for user feedback.

Overall, a successful exercise, and because we worked in Zoom whiteboard, I know exactly how long the discussion took us to complete from ideas to decision. I opened the whiteboard at 12:57pm, and it was finished at 1:34pm. Not a bad 30 minute session.

The visual and manipulative medium of moving these items between dropdown experiences is all a part of my design thinking process. I want to join voices in the room who care about our users and their struggles. When we come from the place of solving for our users’ pain points, we can use our tools and our academic exercises to find solutions and rapidly prototype to get our users’ feedback.

Originally published at http://electricduckdesigns.com on October 25, 2024.