Every organization struggles how information flows within their community every now and then, it's not something new. We had a similar situation in my department at Veriff, an Estonian startup. In order to solve our problem, we went through a couple of steps, including card sorting.

People were complaining about how the information was getting lost very quickly. It was getting harder and harder to keep track of things in our messaging channels. I was one of those people who was getting frustrated with lots of messages every day, not knowing where to find things. After all, in our department, we had close to 200 people in a fast-paced multicultural environment with non-stop typing. Oh, and no guidelines to follow. If you were out for 3 days that meant there was a mess waiting for you, hundreds of messages in many different channels, some overlapping.

4 people within the department formed up a team and decided to tackle this problem, I decided to hop on the train after hearing about this.

How do we communicate?

As a first step, we looked at how many messages we send, how it differs from day-to-day, how many messaging channels we use. Numbers are cool but don't always provide you all the insight you need.

In order to understand how we communicate, we chose 6 channels to work with, went ahead and did a thematic analysis of the messages that were sent in the last 30 days. Yes, checking every single message and categorizing them. What and where we share things. This was a little time consuming but very useful practice for us to see the overlaps and misuses.

What do you think?

Following the stats and thematic analysis, the next step was sending out a questionnaire. We wanted to see what people think about how we handle our communications within the department and how could we possibly improve. Anonymous, mixed with closed and open-ended questions.

We managed to gather around 160 responses and the results were not very surprising. The majority was thinking that there have been many cases where they missed important information, we had too many channels. Potential solutions offered by the people were reducing the number of channels and making them more organized.

How do you think?

See? It was easy. Listen to the people, reduce the number, rename some channels, and problem solved! Magic. It can't be that hard to do that, right? It's not like we were planning the structure that was going to be used by close to 200 people coming from many different backgrounds and cultures on a daily basis or anything.

The team was discussing how to rename the channels, I realized we all had different ideas in our heads and suggested conducting a quick user experience exercise.

"If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine."

- Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape.

We had numbers and what people think in our hands, very useful but not enough to solve the communication issue. For that, we needed something else and decided to go with card sorting.

Card sorting is a simple and powerful research technique for discovering how people understand and categorize information. It helps to see informational structures users think within. All the mess we have creates an unnecessary cognitive load when people perform their daily tasks, and card sorting could help us to provide a better structure by understanding how people think they should share and receive information.

So, we picked 25 messages from those 6 channels we chose at the beginning, printed them out, worked on coming up with alternative channel names, and conducted two exercises with 15 people. Open and closed card sortings.

Sorry, we need one more

What happened?

The first step was an open card sorting exercise. We asked people to organize the messages the way they see them fit and then name the categories. It was interesting to see that we had a range from 3 to 12 categories, with an average of 7,3.

Yes, you remember it right. Even though the potential solution offer was reducing the number of channels, people actually created one more channel. From 6 to an average of 7,3.

Then as the second step, using the same messages we asked people to organize them again. This time according to the names we came up with. We renamed the channels where messages were taken from. Everyone struggled a little, said some messages just did not fit into any of them.

Community Dynamics

Combining and analyzing all of the data, we came up with a new structure, offered basic guidelines, and shared the timeline on planned changes. We gave people time to see the result of our work and share their ideas as well. The work was done in the fall of 2019, and the change took place in December 2019.

Since then, we didn't see many complaints about how the information flows within the department and the team became more aligned. It actually made it more clear what parts of the communication puzzle were missing and needed improvements. But of course, one size does not fit all, and community dynamics change over time which will probably require a revisit to this work soon.