But… Why?

It was silly and fun. And that is sometimes the best way to get people to engage. Be silly. Be Fun.

This was a pretty simple activity to discover something (that was also) pretty simple.

I had budget for fun and frolic – so I designed a walk-in, interactive card sort to use at our users' conference.

As a UX team, we wanted to keep it quick and engaging so that I would get input from a significant number of the domain experts who would be walking by my booth. I wanted to know how city employees categorize and prioritize data types in their own mind.

I was working on a new persistent and interactive header for our applications' records document. Before this feature, the only way users were able to get all the data they wanted to use at the same time, was to click between tabs and try to remember what they read!

But that header would only help them if we architected the content well. We wanted to know what different users (based on the type of records they work with) needed the most as they worked.

The data gleaned from this helped solidify the content of the final design that we shipped. You can take a look at in the photo carousel above.