When to Run an Open Card Sort, Not a Closed One
A team is redesigning a settings page and doesn't yet know whether their current category structure matches how users actually think about the content.
Which card-sorting approach fits, and when should it run?
The correct answer is "Open card sort, early — before a structure is proposed."
Open card sorting gives participants the individual content cards with no predefined categories and lets them group and label things however makes sense to them — it's the right tool exactly when the IA doesn't exist yet or the current one is suspected wrong, since it reveals the user's actual mental groupings and vocabulary, uncontaminated by categories the team already has in mind. Closed card sorting, by contrast, tests whether a structure the team has already proposed holds up — it's a later, validation step, not a discovery one.
The distractors swap the method or the timing: a closed sort run early would just be pressure-testing a hypothesis the team doesn't have data to support yet; an open sort "late, to confirm a nearly-finished structure" describes what a closed sort or a tree test is actually for, not an open sort; and closed sorting isn't the only valid method for a settings page — it's specifically the wrong one when the goal is discovering an unknown mental model.
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