Right now I’m working with a client to help them define content and user experience design for a medium sized educational website. During the past few weeks we’ve had some lively stakeholder interviews and group discussion around the different types of content for the site. I thought I had a pretty good idea of how all the pieces were related.

When I sat down to lay out the wireframes I realized that there were a lot of unanswered questions. The core page’s content is so subject matter-specific that I was having a hard time answering the questions myself, regardless of how much discovery and requirements gathering I had done.

To solve the problem I introduced a variation of a card sorting activity at our meeting. On index cards I wrote down every type of content that might possibly appear on the page. I had the team work together to arrange the cards in groups in order of the content’s priority on the page. I asked them to complete the first five minutes of the activity without speaking to one another; I wanted them to share their gut instincts rather than making decisions based on a friendly discussion.

Four minutes into it they were ready to talk! During the process of arranging the cards they discovered a lot of questions they didn’t have before. We were able to have a healthy debate about the tangible decisions they had each made, and since there was a physical artifact on the table it made the conversation instantly more grounded. The entire process worked really well to clear up ambiguity in the terms we had been discussing abstractly for weeks. Although there were some heated moments (some of the team members felt very strongly about their intuition!) everyone was able to reach a consensus at the end.

At a high level, the outcomes of the exercise were:

• Clearly defined content modules
• A new plan for what type of content needs to be created
• A hierarchy for the page that everyone agrees on

The whole activity only took about an hour, and it saved me a lot of time sketching and discovering the information they already know.