A new card sorting tool
My friends at Optimal Usability have released their brand-spanking new card sorting tool into beta release (it’s free until August).
Their tool, called OptimalSort, caters for open and closed card sorts. The sorting interface is a spatial drag-and-drop.
The thing I like best (and I will fully disclose that I was involved in this, so I should like it) is the analysis options. No stinkin dendrograms here, but lists of category names, detailed participant results and lots of ways to explore the data.
Go try OptimalSort.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
This looks real good and easy to use!
So far, I’ve been advising clients to use WebSort (websort.net) if they wanted to do online/remote card sorting. Can you tell me how the two compare/differ?
Thanks a lot!
Stephan
June 17th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
OptimalSort has far better analysis capabilities. And I like the sorting method better - websort has some interaction oddities.
But go and have a look. It is free at the moment.
July 11th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Oooh, my god! The best stuff!
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July 17th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Hi, Donna. Great comments!
Do you have any recommendations on making dendograms useful? I agree with some of the problems for “interpreting” dendograms, specially when the groups are not easy to distinguish because of poor (or lack of) color representation, etc.
I personally like dendograms, but I do find that most designer’s mental models of how dendograms ought to look make them hard to use for analyzing card sorting results (even for those of us with statistical backgrounds!).
I do wonder what are the top ten complaints that most people have with the use of dendograms for analyzing card sorting results. Do you have any ideas?
August 9th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Hi Veronica, sorry I’m slow to answer.
The best way to make dendrograms useful is to:
1. Understand the statistics behind them
2. Vary the way ‘closeness’ is measured and generate a few different versions of the dendrograms
3. Don’t look at one dendrogram, but at the differences generated by different algorithms
And don’t collect more data than you need - that way it is easier to analyse anyway