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Organization of Categories:

Hierarchical Structure: Depending on the complexity and diversity of the content, some categories may be nested within more comprehensive categories. Participants often naturally grouped all labels related to the company and its mission into one category, which resulted in a lack of distinction and balance between label groupings. The recommended “About Us” and “Mission” categories serve to create a better balance between label distribution and provide improved guidance for users in locating specific website categories. This hierarchical arrangement helps in organizing the information more logically and makes it more navigable for the users.
Adaptation for Website: The categories identified through the open card sort are used to recommend navigation structure and other informational hierarchies on the website. This structure aims to mirror the way users expect to find and interact with the content on other similar retail and social enterprise based websites.

Prioritization: Categories such as clothing and accessories that consistently emerged as top choices should be given prominence in the website’s navigation and layout, rather than relegated to a subcategory. Additionally, a clear and descriptive category that encompasses commonly misunderstood or confused labels should be given prevalence in the main navigation to improve overall user understanding and searchability.
Flexibility: As SocialOutfit.org evolves, categories should be periodically reviewed and adjusted based on ongoing user feedback, testing, and site analytics. For instance, if “Gift” and “Gift Cards” continue to cause confusion amongst users, these could be separated into distinct categories or clearer labels to reduce discrepancies.

Explanation & Justification

Participants consistently grouped organizational and mission information together, which resulted in an imbalanced category that became a catchall – indicated by the similarity matrix, where many labels were grouped together. Participants repeatedly suggested category names like “About us” alongside categories like “What we do”, “Company Mission”, and “Our Mission” that contained a mix of these labels. This group was ultimately split into this category of “About Us” and a separate one called “Mission & Supporters”. The two categories “About Us” and “Mission & Supporters” create more balanced groupings and a clearer separation of the intent behind these categories, where “About Us” focuses more on the historical and static information about the organization.

Explanation & Justification:

The word “Accessories” showed up in a category name 11 times (out of 23 participants)