Using Card Sorts to Understand how Users Think of Personal Information

Understanding how users think of personal information, and how they mentally categorise or classify the objects they work with, should inform the design of personal information management (PIM) or personal retrieval systems. However, most investigations of this topic predate widespread multimedia, websites, and social media—objects that a contemporary PIM or retrieval system should work with. We describe a pilot study that has used a variant of card sorts to elicit categories for personal information such as files, email, tweets, and websites. Our early results suggest that there are common categorisations which are not yet supported by PIM software, but which might reward further work. Our results also suggest that—with some caveats— card sorts are useful for understanding users’ categories.