Beyond the application: xSort’s revenge

February 1, 2006 | Posted by stuartchurch | Filed under IA, Methods & techniques, Software  

I’ve already espoused the virtues of xSort and how it makes card sorting sessions so much easier, so it was a little disappointing to come down to earth with a bang when using it. It’s one thing to do a card sort, but another thing entirely to communicate the results of the sort. And xSort is terrible for that. It allows you to produce nice reports, but there’s no way at all to export them (well, you can export the distance matrix as a CSV file or the sort results as XML, but they’re only really useful if you want to do further manipulation on the data). You can’t even save the dendrograms unless you take a screen grab. The only way to open a report is using xSort. As I’m the only person in the world that I know who has a copy at the moment, I don’t find this to be particularly useful tool for communication!

I guess the lesson here is that you also have to think about the user experience beyond the application. As a self-contained entity, xSort can’t easily be faulted. However, my workflow extends beyond this. And if it actively hinders me from getting to the next step then it seriously reduces its usefulness to me. Which is a real shame.

Comments

One Response to “Beyond the application: xSort’s revenge”

  1. Gustavo Pimenta on April 19th, 2008 12:37 pm

    Thanks for your feedback on xSort. We can only improve with the help of our users.

    Now you can export results as HTML.

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About

I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...

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