15. People Are Driven to Create Categories

If you’re between the ages of 5 and 60 and grew up with a television in the United States, you will probably know what I mean if I say, “One of these things is not like the other.” This is a snippet from the popular children’s show Sesame Street.

The purpose of this Sesame Street lesson is to teach young children how to notice differences and, essentially, how to start to learn to categorize.

Interestingly, it’s probably unnecessary, and perhaps even ineffective, to teach children how to create categories, for two reasons:

• People naturally create categories. Just as learning a native language happens naturally, so does learning to categorize the world around us.

• Categorizing doesn’t emerge as a skill until about age 7. Thinking about categories just doesn’t make sense to children before that. After age 7, however, kids become fascinated with categorizing information.

People Love to Categorize

Because of my work in user experience and the design of Web sites and other technology products, I’ve spent a lot of time doing what is called a card-sorting exercise. In card sorting, you typically give someone a stack of cards. On each card is a word or phrase about something they would find at a Web site. For example, if you’re designing a Web site that sells camping equipment, then you might have a set of cards that say things like “tents,” “stoves,” “backpack,” “returns,” “shipping,” and “help.” In a card-sorting exercise, you ask people to arrange the cards into whatever groups or categories make sense to them. You can have several people do the task, then analyze the groupings, and have data from which to build the organization of your Web site. I’ve done this many times, including using it as an exercise in classes I teach. It’s one of the most engaging tasks I have people do. Everyone gets very involved in this exercise, because people like to create categories.

If You Don’t Provide Categories, People Will Create Their Own

People will impose categories when they’re confronted with large amounts of information. People use categorization as a way to make sense of the world around them, especially when they feel overwhelmed with information.

If you don’t organize your material into different categories, then the audience will try to organize it themselves.

Who Organizes Doesn’t Matter as Much as How Well it’s Organized

I have a Ph.D. in psychology. Along the way I also earned a master’s degree in psychology. For my master’s thesis, I conducted research on whether people would remember information better if other people had organized it or if they had organized it themselves. Basically, what I found was that it didn’t really matter. What mattered most was how well it was organized. The more organized the information, the better people remembered it. Some people (those who measured high on “locus of control” measures) preferred to organize the information in their own way, but self-organization versus other-organization schemes didn’t really matter as long as the information was well organized.

How you organize the material for your presentation is very important. In the chapter “How to Craft Your Presentation,” you will learn a way to organize your topics for maximum engagement and persuasion. Whether you use that method or some other way, make sure that you do organize your information. You can have great content, but if it is poorly organized it won’t seem great—it will seem mediocre.