Donna Spencer’s “Card Sorting” now on sale

Yes, it’s finally here! Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, by Donna Spencer, is now available in both paperback and digital editions.

A whole book on card sorting, you ask?

Absolutely. Many user research methods, like card sorting, have been well covered as chapters in broader books. Mike Kuniavsky’s wonderful Observing the User Experience is an excellent example of one such title.

But as User Experience matures, practitioners are beginning to require deeper explorations of critical methods and how to use them. Donna’s book offers just that for card sorting. To the uninitiated observer, card sorting both sounds funny (“huh? sorting cards?”) and looks funny (“what are those index cards doing spread out all over that table?”). However, anyone who’s run a card sorting exercise knows that there are many complex issues to address with card sorting, and that something very powerful can emerge from those humble stacks. (It’s also a heck of a lot of fun for moderators and subjects alike. And you can’t beat the cost.)

So we humbly offer Card Sorting as an example of what we hope to do for many other methods. We hope you’ll enjoy it, and spread the good word about card sorting, and Donna’s new book.

PS We really want to add a special thanks to our production team for their great work on this book, especially David Womack and Marta Justak. Well done!