Information architecture and hierarchical content navigation menu play an important role when searching for information on a website. The trade-off between the depth (number of levels) and breadth (number of categories at each level) of the navigation menu affects the performance and efficiency of the user search process. The card sorting method, where participants group the content according to their mental models, is often used for content organization and the design of information architecture and navigation menus. In this master’s thesis, we investigated the open and semi-open approach of card sorting, comparing the results of the formed hierarchies between the two approaches according to the number of levels (depth), the number of categories at each level (breadth) and the proportion of unarranged content elements. In addition, we asserted the proportion of participants who made a category change in the semi-open classification, where two categories were given on the first level. The results showed that participants in the open card sorting approach on average created wider and shallower menus, which, according to menu design recommendations and prior studies, are in principle more effective than the deeper and narrower menus obtained with the semi-open approach.
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