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Improving category taxonomy through card sorting and tree testing
In April 2020, to help enhance the User Experience of the platform, improving the category taxonomy of BaSalam was one of the company’s main objectives. Basalam is the first and biggest social marketplace in Iran with the mission to connect buyers to producers and sellers of local and homemade products.
The problem
The category taxonomy not only served as the backbone of thecompany’s website for buyers but as a structure to which vendors had to assign their products. Nevertheless, the content was structured based on what made sense to the company, not to the users, and thus inefficient to both vendors and buyers.
In most cases, the top-level categories ended up showing an endless list of products that did not make sense as the list was simply too long or generic, leaving the users frustrated. Hence, the scopes needed to be further defined before a meaningful and manageable list of products was shown.
Moreover, the taxonomy segmentation was not consistent. Several same-level categories were classified based on product usage (e.g., home decor), whilst others were divided based on profession (e.g., blacksmiths) or material (e.g., weavings), making the structure incomprehensible and hard for users to find what they were looking for.
My solution
One of the primary ways to figure out an organization scheme that best matches the user’s mental model is through card sorting. Therefore, in order to ensure that the redesigned version was as user-friendly as possible, I decided to make card sorting an integral part of the process.
Card sorting is a UX research method in which study participants group individual labels written on note cards according to criteria that make sense to them. This method uncovers how the target audience’s domain knowledge is structured and creates an information architecture that matches users’ expectations.
I chose an open card sort, rather than a closed one because I wanted to find out how users grouped Basalam’s content, rather than imposing groups upon them. In my experience, closed card sorting is best suited to situations where you either need to validate an information architecture with end users or…
