Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Review: Stickysorter - Free Cardsorter / Digital Post Its Software

Stickysorter from Microsoft Research is an interesting tool on two fronts - One, it is simple to use; Two, it is a good example of "do one thing reasonably well" software i.e. it has limited features which are easily accessible. To add to the sweetness, it is available for free (Yep..not shareware or evaluation versions - Free).

That said, it is a Windows PC Installed application, not a remote / online one but if you have a Webex / netmeeting or something similar, you can utilize it for remote cardsorts as well.

Stickysorter allows for grouping of cards, addition of custom fields, stuff that you can put on the other side (to flip later), different color coded cards (limited to a few though) etc. It saves everything as a .CSV file so that the results can be later opened / printed like a spreadsheet.



This also means that for the folks who likes spreadsheets better, you can take your card sorts, group them in a visual post it style approach, then close Stickysorter, open the .csv with Excel (or something similar), autofilter & utilize the full Excel UI experience (Accountants rejoice!!).

Disclaimer: I have not used other card sorting tools, so not sure if what I find cool about this are standard features or not. Stickysorter is freely downloadable from Microsoft Research Site