Guide
A short guide to putting things in order
Sorting is one of the oldest jobs in information work, and one of the easiest to do badly. This guide sets out the ideas behind the sorting lab, and the decisions we ask every client to make before anything is rearranged.
Start here
Order is a decision, not a default
Material arrives in an order. An archive is ordered by the date it came in. A spreadsheet is ordered by whoever typed last. A report is ordered by the sequence in which its authors wrote their sections. None of these orders was designed for the reader, and most readers never learn that. Sorting is the act of replacing an accidental order with one somebody chose.
Mechanics
Keys, comparisons and ties
Every sort depends on a key, the property the arrangement uses: a date, a name, a size or a priority. A comparison asks which of two items comes first on that key. Most of the trouble in ordering lives in the cases where two items share a key and the rule has to decide what happens to them.
Stable and unstable methods
A stable method keeps tied items in the order they started. Imagine a list of meeting notes sorted by date. Two notes from the same afternoon appear in the order they were filed. A stable sort keeps them in that order, so the person reading the list still sees what came first. An unstable method may swap them, and nothing on the page tells the reader why.
Bubble, insertion and merge sorts, as they are usually written, are stable. Selection sort, as it is usually written, is not. Choose a method by what the readers need to keep, and not only by how quickly it runs.
Choosing
Choosing a sequence for a reader
- Chronological
- Right for records, logs and anything where the reader asks when something happened. Poor for a briefing, because the most important item may sit in the middle.
- By importance
- Right for a briefing or a decision memo. It requires an honest account of what counts as important, written down so that it can be challenged.
- By task
- Right for handbooks and guides. Each section answers a question a reader arrives with, in the order those questions usually come up.
- Alphabetical
- Right for indexes, glossaries and directories. Excellent for finding a known thing, and of little help in learning what that thing belongs to.
- By relationship
- Right for systems and procedures, where each step depends on the one before it. Show the dependency, or the reader will guess at it.
Testing
Testing an order with a stranger
The simplest test is also the most revealing. Ask someone who has never seen the material to find three specific things. Do not help them. Watch where they pause, where they scroll back, and where they guess instead of knowing. Each of those places marks a decision the order has not made clear.
- Write down the question you asked, and the section where the person first looked.
- Note each moment of hesitation. Hesitation is more useful than a wrong answer.
- Change the order, then test again with someone new. The second test is never quite the same as the first.
Reference
A short glossary
- Key
- The property an arrangement uses to decide order, such as a date, a name or a size.
- Comparison
- A check of two items against the key, asking which should come first.
- Move
- A change to the arrangement, such as a swap or a write back into the list.
- Stable
- Keeps tied items in their original relative order.
- Unstable
- May reverse tied items. Harmless for some uses and misleading for others.
- Finding aid
- A map of a collection or an archive, built so that a person can locate things without reading everything.
Working on something?
A document that has grown past its order?
Write to hello@ukaia.agency and describe the material in a few sentences. We will tell you where we would begin.