Biggest. Card sort. Ever.

Sane people do 30 cards....

It's the end of Day 3 of The Great Plone Card Sort. Our goal? Organize plone.org's documentation section in a sane way. Till now, it's been organized, roughly speaking, by document size—not the most useful scheme in the world. The new scheme that's shaking out looks like by-subject (Interestingly, it's not by-audience, which is something that keeps popping up as a suggestion.)

As limi cites (with pictures!)...

[M]ore than 100 cards can be time consuming and tiring for participants. However, we have performed successful card sorts with over 200 cards where participants understood the content well.

We have 1200.

Nevertheless, it's going quite well. Apparently, card sorts are iterable: you can do a "round" of sorting, end up with crappy categories, and then, the pile being chunked into larger, more comprehensible pieces, move stuff around to get better categories. About 3 rounds of this*, and we had some decent categories. The categories then began to clump together in sensical ways, suggesting broad supercategories. The final results should be in tomorrow. We're transcribing the categories that we think are finished on our wiki, from which they will move to the actual Plone documentation site. Thanks to all the doc sprinters who helped!

*Actually, the "rounds" were not discrete; moving documents from category to category was a continuous process, but I estimate each document moved about 3 times.

By Erik Rose on Friday, June 29, 2007

In Plone

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