Introduction
Card storming is a combination of brainstorming and card sorting. The benefits of both techniques for information architecture (IA) are well known, but they can be unwieldy in practice. Card storming integrates both processes so they are more efficient to use.
Materials required: pens, one large sheet of paper and Post-it notes of different colors.
How to do card
In standard IA brainstorming, a mass of possible content for a website can be brainstormed with each participant writing at will onto one large sheet of paper.
The problem with this approach is that the content ideas are then difficult to manipulate during brainstorming and time is wasted re-transcribing them for later card sorting sessions.
Instead, with card storming, each separate content idea is written directly onto a Post-it note, and can be used immediately for card sorting.
Figure 1
Brainstorming with Post-it notes makes card sorting much easier.
Differently coloured Post-it notes can also be used to mark content ideas according to any attribute. In the photo examples, yellow has been used to signify content that exists already, and blue for content that will have to be commissioned. In figure 2 we can see at a glance that most of the content exists already, but that one whole category of content will have to be commissioned.
Figure 2
Colour-coding means content attributes can be checked at a glance.
Note: It is important to use Post-it notes and not index cards. The reason is that once all the content has been sorted, the backing paper can be folded up and moved to be transcribed elsewhere. If index cards are used, the arrangements will be scattered out of order when the paper is moved.