Card Sorting With Your Team: A Quick Guide

Running a card sort with colleagues is fast, free, and surprisingly useful — if you do it for the right reasons.

This guide explains when team card sorting works, how to run it well, and how to combine it with external research for the most complete picture.

When Team Card Sorting Works

Internal tools and intranets. If your team is the user, team card sorting is exactly what you should be doing. Sorting by HR, finance, or operations colleagues for a company intranet is legitimate research.

Early-stage exploration. When you're at the beginning of a project and need a quick feel for how content might group — before investing in a full external study — a team sort is a fast way to generate hypotheses.

Alignment workshops. Card sorting with stakeholders isn't just about IA research — it's a powerful workshop format. Getting product, engineering, and business stakeholders to physically group content items together surfaces disagreements and builds shared understanding faster than any slide deck.

Validating instructions and card clarity. Before recruiting real users, running your study with 3–5 teammates catches confusing cards, broken links, and unclear instructions. Think of it as a technical pilot.

When Team Card Sorting Doesn't Work

Consumer-facing products. If your app or website is used by the general public, your colleagues will not sort cards the way your customers do. They know too much. They use internal vocabulary. Their mental models are shaped by how you built the product, not how users experience it.

Using team results to drive consumer navigation decisions is one of the most common IA mistakes. The patterns look clean and confident because everyone in the building thinks the same way — but they don't match real users.

Domain-specific audiences. If you're building a platform for doctors, lawyers, or engineers, sorting by your marketing team will produce misleading results. Match your participants to your actual users.

How to Run a Team Card Sort

Step 1: Share the link in Slack

The fastest method. Paste your FreeCardSort study link into a relevant Slack channel with a short message:

"Running a quick study to improve our navigation — would love 5 minutes of your time. No login needed. [link]"

A direct channel like #product, #design, or #allhands typically gets 10–20 responses from a team of 50–100 people.

Step 2: In-session workshop format

For higher engagement and richer discussion, run the sort as a live workshop activity:

1. Open your study on a shared screen or ask everyone to open it on their own device
2. Give participants 10 minutes to sort independently (no discussion yet)
3. After sorting, review the results together using your study's results page
4. Discuss points of disagreement — these are usually the most valuable moments

The live discussion that follows a team card sort often produces better insights than the sort data itself.

Step 3: Follow up with reminders

Response rates from Slack messages typically drop off quickly. A single follow-up 2–3 days later can double your final count. Keep the message short: "A few more responses would really help — takes 5 minutes!"

Combining Team and External Research

The most thorough approach: run team card sorting early to generate hypotheses, then validate with external participants.

Phase 1 (team, day 1): Sort with 5–10 colleagues to identify candidate groupings and catch any confusing cards.

Phase 2 (external, days 2–7): Recruit 15–20 real users via Prolific or your own user base. Compare results.

Where team and external results agree, you have high confidence. Where they diverge, investigate why — the gaps are often where the most valuable UX improvements hide.

Tips for Getting Better Team Participation

• Keep it under 5 minutes. The shorter your study, the higher the completion rate. Aim for 20–30 cards maximum for a quick team sort.
• Explain why it matters. "We're redesigning the help center" gets more clicks than "please complete this study."
• Don't make it mandatory. Forced participation produces poor data — people rush through without thinking.
• Run it asynchronously. Don't schedule a meeting just to take a card sort. The async Slack approach respects people's time and gets better results.

Ready to run a team study? Create your card sort for free →