USER INTERFACE AND ALGORITHM TO HANDLE "UNKNOWN" DATA IN CARD-SORTING EXERCISE AND CLUSTER ANALYSIS

Card-sorting exercises are used to understand how users would intuitively group or sort information topics, in order to better design an instrument that provides these topics, such as a website. When a user is not familiar with some of the topics, they are allowed to leave these items unsorted, in order that wild guesses do not skew the results. The algorithm verifies that the unsorted items are unfamiliar, then tracks instances of unsorted items so that these responses are mathematically removed from the calculations.