The Complete Guide to Card Sorting for Better UX
Master card sorting to build navigation that matches how users think. Learn open, closed, and hybrid methods with step-by-step instructions.
AfkarMarch 2, 2026
Master card sorting to build navigation that matches how users think. Learn open, closed, and hybrid methods with step-by-step instructions.
Card sorting is one of the most powerful — and underused — UX research methods. It reveals how real users think about your content, navigation, and information architecture.
Whether you're redesigning a website, building a new app, or trying to fix confusing navigation, card sorting gives you data-driven answers instead of guesswork.
Card sorting is a UX research method where participants organize topics, labels, or content into groups that make sense to them. Each "card" represents a piece of content, feature, or navigation item.
The goal is simple: understand how your users mentally organize information so you can build navigation and structures that match their expectations.
| Problem | How Card Sorting Helps |
|---|---|
| Users can't find what they need | Reveals natural mental models |
| Navigation labels confuse users | Discovers preferred terminology |
| Information architecture feels "off" | Maps content to user expectations |
| Redesign needs data, not opinions | Provides quantitative agreement data |
Participants create their own categories and group cards into them. Best for discovering how users naturally organize information.
When to use: Early-stage research, new product, major redesign.
You provide pre-defined categories. Participants sort cards into those fixed groups. Best for validating an existing or proposed structure.
When to use: Testing a proposed navigation, comparing alternatives.
Pre-defined categories exist, but participants can also create new ones. Combines discovery with validation.
When to use: When you have a hypothesis but want to stay open to surprises.
| Decision | Open Sort | Closed Sort |
|---|---|---|
| You have no existing structure | ✅ | ❌ |
| You're validating a redesign | ❌ | ✅ |
| You want both discovery + validation | Hybrid | Hybrid |
Remote (unmoderated):
In-person:
Similarity Matrix: Shows how often participants grouped any two cards together. High similarity (>70%) means strong association.
Dendrograms: Tree diagrams that show hierarchical clustering of cards. Help identify natural category boundaries.
Category Naming: In open sorts, analyze the category names participants created. Common themes suggest intuitive labels.
Minimum viable analysis: Look at the similarity matrix. If two cards are grouped together by >70% of participants, they belong together. If <30%, they're in different mental categories.
Afkar supports both open and closed card sorting with real-time results. Create a study, add your cards, recruit Arabic-speaking participants from the MENA region, and get dendrogram analysis automatically.
No need for spreadsheets or manual clustering — the platform does the analysis for you.
