Free Figma Card Sorting Template & Tutorial

As we, UX/UI designers, strive to make better and more trustworthy designs, it comes to notice that there are not many free easy to implement tools that allow us to really focus on what’s important: the user and the project.

Maybe this is why, until recently, I’d been building templates for myself. I guess I just wanted to have a little bit of a technical nudge, just be able to go ahead and do my work.

Later (it should have been sooner) however, I realized that posting these templates out there could hopefully save some work for other fellow designers. So, without further ado, here is my Free Qualitative and Quantitative Card Sorting Figma Template.

(IMAGE OF TEMPLATE HERE)

How and why to use it:

Let me try to convince you to stay a bit longer, by telling you that this article is also a tutorial on why and how to use the template as a UX/UI tool. For the “why”, let us check how it relates to information architecture (I.A.). If you just want to go ahead and read the template’s how to use instructions, you can click here.

What does card sorting have to do with information architecture?

The first step I usually go through when applying I.A. to my projects is called card sorting. Thankfully it’s not only me. Card sorting is fast becoming a widely implemented technique in design systems of many sorts.

This is because information architecture is a discipline that involves the user, the content and the context. And, of course, as designers, we want the three of them to be accounted for when we work.

Information architecture does this with its three main pillars: ontology, taxonomy and choreography.

To keep the story short, we could say that ontology relates to labelling correctly the content that the user will find on our application, website or product.

Taxonomy is how the content will be organized within that same product.

Last, choreography involves the user’s actual interactions with our ontology and taxonomy. Choreography is how we arrange possible interactions so that the user can actually find content based on how they themselves group things and how they expect to be able to find them. In addition, the perfect choreography of our product should also account for future technologies and query techniques.

Let’s make it even shorter.

Now we can move on to understand card sorting and its uses.

Card Sorting

Once we know these principles, we can understand why card sorting is so helpful. We can even see clearly which steps of I.A., card sorting helps solving. Let’s see why card sorting is useful first.

Imagine you’re about to release a website where you’ll sell all kinds of groceries. How should you organize the site’s content so that it’s logical to your customers? You guessed it! This is a job for card sorting.

By simply writing the names of your products on cards and have people group them in whatever way they deem logical, you’ll be accomplishing your first card sorting exercise. But there’s much more you can do.