Creating Empathy Maps is useful for synthesizing research data in order to better understand the users. Empathy Maps are great for creating Personas, identifying users with different mindsets.
Workshops
Empathy Maps — UX Knowledge Base Sketches
Knowledge
How to Improve Your Design Team’s Productivity — The Startup
The main goal of Card Sorting is to improve a website’s or an application’s Information Architecture, to help designing how the information is organized and labelled.