Categories and Taxonomies

About

Useful help centers guide people through journeys and answer their questions along the way. Categories that reflect a user-centered taxonomy provide the map — the shape and details — that users need to find their way.

Scenario: improve information access and discovery within and across product domains

We had more than 12,000 help topics that described how to use a couple dozen desktop applications. The content was produced and managed by 18 different writers and lived in dozens of separate help projects. The only visible snapshots of the content's full scope were the back-end folder structures in the help projects and the front-end tables of contents in the published help, all of which were structured primarily by system function rather than the user’s journey. It was difficult and time consuming for contributors who weren’t experts to identify content gaps, redundancies, and relationships within and across product domains. We needed to create a holistic picture of our content – a framework organized by subject and task – to help contributors and users understand, find, and discover all available content.

Process

I facilitated group discussions with subject matter experts (SMEs) to create preliminary subject categories around the content for each product. Once we drafted potential categories, I designed and conducted online card sorting studies (open/closed hybrid studies using OptimalSort) to refine categories. The participants included approximately 60 SMEs from Support and 10 from Technical Communications. Based on results from the studies, I revised our preliminary categories and further refined and validated them with a smaller focus group of SMEs. (Ideally, we would have included actual customers throughout this process, but customers weren't accessible.)

Once all categories were pinned down, we embedded subject metadata in our HTML-based help, which enabled contributors to access subject metadata with minimal disruption to their workflows and also enabled us to surface metadata to users in our published help. (For more information about the metadata, please read about how we designed a custom metadata schema to enrich our content.)

Results

Visitors to the online help center can browse curated content by subject and pre-filter searches by subject, which helps visitors find and discover content.

I created a spreadsheet to record all products' user-facing subject categories and their equivalent back-end metadata values, which enables contributors to accurately tag content.