2025-01-10 Module 3: Taxonomy workshops

About workshops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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