2025-01-10 Module 3: Taxonomy workshops

About workshops

5 exercises

Business case, audience definition, verb identification, noun identification, metadata field prioritization

• 12-18 people

• Mix of users - x-hierarchical, x-functional, geographically dispersed, mix of tenure

• ‘horse-shoe’ configuration of how users are seated (C-shaped seating arrangement)

  • facilitating a debate, keeps everyone aligned and on equal footing

• We learn by seeing, hearing, doing, and questioning

Why we care about this

• gives us a quick start to tax design so that the business case and scope emerges quickly

• creates core group of stakeholders who get tax

• breaks down traditional org thinking and allows users to open up to new concepts

• established long-term stewards for enterprise technology

Facilitation style

• turn-based facilitation - go around the table, hear from each person

• assign, write, present, discuss

  • now do this, each person writes what they think (silence), tell group what they’ve written, facilitator manages discussion

• requires strong facilitator with clear mandate

Workshop concept

• each piece builds on the previous piece

• understand and baseline tax

• develop clear list of primary metadata fields

• create starter tax

• develop clear path to first implementable version of the tax

Workshop exercises

Business case

• make sure all participants are on the same page

  • why are they there?

  • what’s the shared goal?

• understand what a business tax is

• why we need it

• what will it do

Audience definition

Gives a baseline for participants' thinking/consideration to design the common vocab.

• part 1: list all potential user types - who are we designing for?

• part 2: what makes these types of users different?

• part 3: take differences and create personas; define our lowest common denominators as personas

  • persona - fake person and tell the story of that person. in design activities, refer back to that person to ensure that it will work for them.

  • personas represent the lowest common denominator

Verb identification

• identify the things we do as an organization.

• identify what people will do in the system (train, acquire, sell, research, search, browse, research, teach, learn, find, store, save, share, collaborate, develop, etc.)

  • keep repeated terms

  • limit number of terms a person contributes

• move away from organization lines and on to clear topics

• people have missions - these vers should align with a user’s missio or need for information

Noun identification

• some things will be too broad or too specific

• eliminate non-topics, distractions or words that are too broad or specific, but keep them all

• Map topics through discussion (slide 87) into categories. All primary topics are fitting into a subset of categories.

  • you will have eliminated a bunch of words, but they’re still valuable. Have a second chair taking notes how words are described - helps capture synonyms.

• Here’s what we will have already accomplished at the top levles

  • we have defined our core topics

  • develop the starting points for other metadata fields

  • started constructing vocabulary: core terms and synonyms

• Repeat this at every level at each increasing level of detail.

Metadata field prioritization

• identify non-topics and raise them for discussion as possible secondary or tertiary metadata fields.

• how to handle too many nouns

  • strive to keep under 15, 10 is ideal. above 15 you lose the standard usability design - the avg person has to read a list and decide what to pick.

  • If you’re struggling, you’re probably combining topics with non-topics

  • half hour on verbs with the rest of the time on nouns

Follow-on process

• the workshop method can be repeated with different groups to gain consensus

• can be repeated with different levels of detail or focus in order to expand or refine

• the most important 1/3 of the tax design puzzle