Here is an example of a visual or image card sort Michael Blakesley and I did for the redesign of the Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (BWI.)
If you want to do run-of-the-mill user research you are going to get run-of-the-mill insights that everone else gets. You need to get insights that your competitors aren’t by using techinques like this.
I got into cardsorting before I came into Information Architecture proper and so I have some different techniques. This is one that I really thinks helps us focus in on content and the core “things” that people are dealing with rather than just the “words” that describe the things.
Card sorting with pictures & images was and is a very useful technique for working with peoples who didn’t have a written language or were themselves illiterate. It’s ironic that we use it for helping to organize and structure large textual groupings.
For those who work on entertainment sites (with movie, video, and music) there are a number of very useful ways to use this way of card sorting to build a much better organization of your information that we currently see out there on the major media and entertainment sites. This kind of sorting I have also successfully used to generate metadata which is another weakness of so many movies, video, and music search & browse interfaces.
Right now I am planning to use a varient of this for some work on reports and reporting dashboards applications which have very complex visual information issues