I was recently asked if a website’s sitemap of company’s website could serve as the start of a taxonomy for an organization. The sitemap, after all, includes all the relevant topics pertaining to an organization’s business offerings, and they are arranged in a hierarchy. I have previously blogged on the…
Category: Information architecture
Navigation Schemes vs. Taxonomies
The feature of being hierarchical does not make something a taxonomy.
Trends in Hierarchical Taxonomy Displays
Taxonomies connect users to content. So, how a taxonomy is displayed to users is very important in its effectiveness. This is a topic about which I gave a conference presentation back in 2011 and will present again next week. As I update my previous presentation, looking at some of the…
Information Architecture and Taxonomies
While interest in “information architecture” by that name has declined in the past decade, interest in what information architecture involves continues to be strong, and perhaps there is some merging of the fields of taxonomy and information architecture. At one point in my career I wanted to be an…
Card Sorting and Taxonomies
Card sorting is a common technique in information architecture for developing the organization of menu labels or categories on websites. It would thus seem to be a very suited methodology for developing all kinds of taxonomies, but in actual practice card sorting is not utilized for most taxonomy projects, at…