I recently put together a card sort for one of our current clients. The concept I designed was start with your basic card sort by content, have the users decide on category names and then challenge their decisions in a secondary sort to provoke a response. 

I couldn’t find any data on a previous, similar sorts  but I was interested in what data would come out of it and if any of the challenges would be insightful. Even if it was for not I figured at least I would get the basic card sort data to work with. I was surprised by the results.  The challenge proved compelling enough for several groups to adjust their methods and one group to change their sort entirely. Part of it, clearly, was also documenting where those changes took place and what that meant as a whole.

I started the concept with a presupposition of how I would sort the data and used that as a model to test my personal insight as well as several coworkers to see how I lined up against the tested end users and my coworkers.

In the next section I am going to describe the sort as it is presented to the sorters with a bit of insight to why it would be presented in this manner.   Stay tuned!