Virtual Live Workshops

Designing Taxonomies to Connect Users to Content

Event: Information Architecture for Artificial Intelligence
Organizer: SWARM Community
Date/Time: Friday, October 11, 2024, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT
Platform: RingCentral Events

Taxonomies help connect users to content, and they improve findability over keyword search alone. As such, taxonomies should be created so that they are customized to the content and to the users, which involves a combination of bottom-up and top-down research and analysis. How to go about this will be addressed in this interactive workshop. Content analysis and term extraction are methods to make a taxonomy match its content, and user interviews and brainstorming sessions are methods to make a taxonomy suit its users. Following an explanation of different taxonomy types and features, exercises will include brainstorming terms, analyzing a document for candidate concepts, designing hierarchical relationships and alternative labels.

Taxonomies have become to be recognized as important, but taxonomies have to be well-designed to be truly useful, and often taxonomies are designed without expertise and thus not properly reflecting their use case, nor conforming to best practices.

Outline:

  • Introduction to taxonomies: definition, purpose, features
  • Taxonomy creation sources with context
  • Top-down: Users and stakeholders as sources & brainstorming exercise
  • Bottom-up: Content as a source & content analysis exercise
  • Structural design: taxonomy hierarchies and facets & hierarchical relationship exercise
  • Concept and label creation & alternative label exercise

In this workshop attendees will:

  • The uses, benefits and features of taxonomies.
  • What resources to use in developing a taxonomy.
  • How to customize a taxonomy for a use case.
  • The basic principles of creating good taxonomies.

Registration and costs

This two-hour hands-on workshop is only $247. Register any time until the day before the event.