What key benefit does card sorting provide in UX?

Card sorting is a valuable method used in user experience design primarily to understand how users categorize information. This technique involves presenting participants with a set of items (which can be web content, features, or any other content type) and asking them to organize or group these items in a way that makes sense to them. The key benefit here lies in the insights gained about users’ mental models and their natural way of organizing information.

By successfully clarifying how users categorize information, card sorting enables designers to create more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. This ensures that content is structured in a way that aligns with users' expectations, ultimately improving the usability of the system being designed.

While improving overall design aesthetics and reducing user testing time are valuable in their own right, they are not the primary focus or benefit that card sorting provides. Enhancing navigation complexity would actually be counterproductive to the goals of card sorting, which aims to simplify navigation and information discovery. Therefore, the clarification of user information categorization stands out as the pivotal advantage of using card sorting in the UX design process.