Taxonomy testing

Card sorting is a popular technique for getting at users' understanding of content structure, relationships and terminology. I often will break out a card sorting exercise early on in a taxonomy project using terms extracted from the client's content or pre-existing taxonomies to get a sense of what kind of organizing principles are important to the users. I also find it to be a great way of socializing the project and educating people in taxonomy and information architecture.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of digital asset management (DAM) projects, where our taxonomy is meant to help organize and give access to a collection of images or other visual assets, usually through faceted search. While the typical card sorting activity is still relevant, given that we'll be using words/labels to create the taxonomy for the assets, I've found it to lack a certain something in this context.

So during my current project with a global pharmaceutical company, I decided to try a different approach: a visual card sort.

The same rules apply here as they do with traditional card sorting: you can do an open card sort (no pre-defined categories given), or a closed card sort (established set of primary categories). The only real difference being you do it with pictures, not words. And it tends to be a bit easier and fun, as many people are inherently visual.