Clustering Survey: How To

Why do a clustering survey?
Clustering is also known as "card-sorting". You often want to know how people group things together -- for grouping options on a website, or for complicated research in Internet use like the HomeNet project. To find out how users group these options, you can give them a survey like this one.

Analysis
Analysis is fairly easy -- just use IBM's EzCalc [download] (which also has a desktop version of the sorting tool, although it is significantly more complex).  For more information and different techniques, see Rashmi Sinha's Card Sorting Theory page.

Technology & Compatibility
This technology works on better than 95% of the web browser market. Almost all web browsers in use support these new tricks. See Walter Zorn's site for information on his Drag and Drop Library, which was used for this project.

How To Use It
This zip file contains a basic webapp to create a clustering/card-sorting survey. Try out the sample page, to see how it works.

1. Download and install Apache Tomcat
2. Unzip the clustering web application and put the "clusteringSurvey" directory into your Tomcat webapps directory (on Windows, this is usually "C:\Program Files\Apache Tomcat 4.0\webapps\" or "C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Tomcat 4.1\webapps". In Linux, this is wherever you installed tomcat to).
3. Follow the directions in clusteringSurvey/surveyOptions.jsp to customize your survey.
4. Run or restart Apache Tomcat (Future addition: better directions for this)
5. Browse to the survey -- usually at http://yourComputerName.net:8080/clusteringSurvey/ or if you're working on the same machine as you have Tomcat on, it could be http://127.0.0.1:8080/clusteringSurvey/
6. If it doesn't look mostly similar to this, something has gone wrong.

If you want us to make this installation process easier, you can help by contributing time -- we've started a webapp installer that will do this process, but it's not in alpha yet!

Other Tools And Links
Other clustering tools and webpages about clustering are available at:
CardZort
EZSort/EzCalc -- IBM, archived [download EzCalc] [original, dead, link]
WebSort (pay service)
Rashmi Sinha's Card Sorting Theory page

IBM EzCalc Note: IBM EzCalc is no longer publicly supported or available from IBM's official site. See IBM's reply to Donna Maurer. You can still get EzSort from a web archive.