What A Cute Bunny: Taxonomy as Liberator

I spent this past week testing a taxonomy as part of a digital asset management project we are currently working on. One of the test scenarios involved giving art taggers a series of images and asking them to code them using the taxonomy we had developed.
Taggers see taxonomy as a blessing and a curse. On [...]

Audience Modeling

Ever since Polish biologist Jastrzębowski coined the term “ergonomics” in 1857, we have been trying to decipher the tricky relationship between machine and human. Regardless of whether you’re designing front-end interface functionality or crafting an information architecture that serves as the clothes hanger for your content, user-centered design is undeniably a major player in achieving [...]

Evangelism Marketing

Testing and validating a taxonomy can go many ways.  With a little luck and some hard work, usually it goes pretty well, you watch users click through the structure, find the right terms, and you go home feeling like everything’s in its right place. 
There are always the nightmare scenarios, the tester who can’t find anything [...]

The Pain and Gain of Taxonomy User Testing

As a taxonomy consultant, I always recommend (rather, urge with great gravitas) to my clients that they reserve some time and budget for adequate user testing. As they say, the proof is in the pudding: there’s nothing better than quantitative data to tell you whether you’ve built a structure that really resonates with your core [...]