It provided a good overview of card sorting methodologies. On paper card sorting might sound like a very basic activity (here are some cards with words on them, now put the cards in related groups), but of course there's more to it than that, particularly at the analysis stage. I must admit I started glazing over when advanced statistical analysis was being discussed, but there's no point doing this at all if you don't know how to analyse your results.

The level of analysis you do of course will depend on your resources and the size of the project. There are dedicated software packages available which will do the analysis for you (including one produced by Syntagm), but you can also just do it in a spreadsheet. There's a template card sorting spreadsheet on Boxes and Arrows which I've yet to look at but which may well be very useful. Donna Spencer has also recently written a book on the subject: Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Rosenfield, 2009) which I haven't seen but was recommended to us (with some caveats which I won't go into here).

There are different kinds of card sorting: open and closed. An open card sort involves the users setting the categories themselves whereas a closed sort uses pre-determined categories with users placing items within the categories. There's also an option to run a "semi-closed" sort with users providing their own alternative names to categories they think are badly named.

I'm keen to use this on a current project, so more thoughts after I've tried this.