Imagine a library that had no system for filing its books, no card catalogs and no computers for searching its inventory. It would be virtually useless for anyone looking for any specific book or topic. This is the importance of having good taxonomy and metadata ingrained in information design, and it’s just as important in the digital workplace.
Problems with information design usually manifest in two fundamental ways, both related to findability. The first is that users can’t find what they need when using search. Users are accustomed to Google, and can quickly become frustrated searching for information they know is in the system and not being returned in the results. The second is that users can’t find the information they want by browsing. They get to a site and the navigation isn’t intuitive, or they end up on a page that doesn’t have information that helps them get closer to what they’re trying to find.
The ability to find information via both searching and browsing are both critical. Some users are searchers, some are browsers, and the digital workplace has to accommodate both so they can access the content they need to be productive. The question then becomes how to store content in a way that it can be easily retrieved later on, and that’s where taxonomy and metadata come in.
Taxonomy And Browsing
Taxonomy is just a fancy word for classifying and organizing information in a systematic way. People tend to do a great job of this at an individual level. They have folders organized a certain way on their computer so they know where to look. But someone else who tried to jump into their file system and find a particular document would be stumped. At the enterprise level, information should be organized in a way that is logical to users as a whole. That taxonomy will generally be mirrored in the site navigation, so a good taxonomy means users will be able to easily find the content they need.
There are a number of different schemes that can be used to classify information. Using the company’s organizational structure as the base for the taxonomy is usually fairly straightforward, and users will come to the table with a decent understanding of how the information is organized. Using a scheme that classifies information based on which functions it’s related to is also fairly straightforward, and a common approach.
Whichever model you choose, a great start to any information design project is a card-sorting exercise, which is an old brainstorming technique that’s great for modern classification. Put together a stack of index cards, each representing a document that might be in the system. Then you should have users from a broad cross-section of the organization decide where they belong among various “buckets,” depending on their properties. Those buckets in turn become the taxonomy.
Metadata And Search
Enterprise search is able to search through the full text of documents, but it’s not very good at contextualizing that information. Google is working with a large dataset and extremely sophisticated algorithms to contextualize information and guess what users are actually looking for. Enterprise search tools don’t have these advantages, so enterprise information management solutions need to add context in different ways. Metadata, or data about the data, helps enterprise search return better results by providing that context.
Metadata for a document could include information based on the document’s place in the taxonomy, such as department of origin. But it also allows for much more granular information, such as language, author and version, which results in more effective searching than would be available through the taxonomy information and full-text searching on their own.
One exciting development is the intersection of taxonomy and metadata to create enterprise browsing experience like what users might expect from Amazon. Many companies are moving from legacy file-share systems, where every file has a single home in a system folder, to solutions like SharePoint.
For instance, if the file structure went year/department/office location, those attributes could be flattened out into metadata for each document. Now a user can browse for a document like they’d shop for a TV. They could drill down to show documents from 2012 that belong to the HR department and originated from the Houston office, for example. Many users have come to expect that type of experience whether they’re shopping or working.
Learn more about getting the most out of today’s enterprise technology tools by downloading our free e-book, “7 Keys To Mastering The Digital Workplace.”
