Card Sorting & Information Architecture Simulator (2D)

Card sorting is one of the core UX research methods for designing a site's navigation: real participants group content items into piles that make sense to them, and researchers cluster the results into a proposed information architecture. This simulator runs that whole pipeline live — a configurable number of synthetic participants sort 15 website content cards under a tunable consistency level, a card-to-card similarity matrix is built from how often each pair landed in the same pile, and average-linkage hierarchical clustering merges the cards into groups. The resulting structure drives a real physics-based 2D layout, where every card pair repels like charged particles while a spring pulls similar cards toward each other, so the emergent categories visibly pull apart from the noise — laid out alongside a live similarity-matrix heatmap, with full pan/zoom/drag interaction.