Novice user involvement in information architecture for a mobile tablet application through card sorting

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process, analysis, results and implications of a card-sorting usability study. The study was conducted in order to investigate user-behavior during the design of a mobile tablet application for inexperienced users centred on the topic of “first aid”. Card sorting is a participant-based knowledge elicitation technique for grouping information into categorical domains. We identified nine categories of cards and three cards were used by a small percentage of users. The categories showed indications of grouping by shared words and task. Differences in grouping were probably due to various mental representations on the part of users. Novices tend to group cards in one level without sub-groupings. Participants made many suggestions regarding possible new content.