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 results. It’s certainly a crucial consideration in every taxonomy project. Project stakeholders often envision the ideal taxonomy as being "all things to all people". It's a wonderful idea in theory, but the resulting structure would be a chaotic mishmash that in practice fails to meet most user needs. Part of the solution is in the art—and science—of understanding and categorizing your audience.
The art—and science—of understanding and categorizing your audience.
Creating usable systems requires user research in order to understand audience goals, needs, and capabilities. This process results in a host of raw data, but the data is only valuable in its effective application to system design. Quantitative data can be measured, charted, and graphed, but that only tells one part of your audience’s story. Popularized as an interaction design method by Alan Cooper, personas are a decision-making and communication tool that can organize the numbers in your data, but also describe patterns of why actual users behave in their particular ways. This qualitative information is the meat of reliable personas.
This qualitative information is the meat of reliable personas.
Research methods differ based on project resources, but my strongest personas derive from a variety of sources. I was recently on a compressed project for an established community of practice where much of the up-front work had been done. Their website featured active discussion boards, member profiles, and user-generated content. Marketing had conducted numerous user surveys and focus groups, and the Content Strategy group unearthed recordings of usability tests. I complemented these with a brief round of interviews with SMEs and Web Analysts. In that situation I was able to do some quick and dirty guerrilla research and jump right into data synthesis, minimizing the research phase. Poking around often reveals a host of readily available information that can be utilized for personas. Looking for low-investment opportunities will help you work around project constraints while still delivering user-centric results. Once research is complete, there are certain data points that are generally hit when creating personas. The most common to look for include demographics, technographics, and psychographics, especially goals:
It’s standard practice to include a name, photo, and pithy quote that sums up the persona’s main position in relation to the system you are designing. Since a single persona represents an entire user group, it also helps to abstract up a level and title that particular segment.
For example, in my previous project with the community of practice, “The Information Spectator” persona as the primary audience had very different needs and participatory patterns on the website than the secondary persona, “The Knowledge Facilitator”.
Personas created for the purpose of classifying and organizing content come with unique considerations.
Personas are a means to an end, but taxonomies are enduring systems that require regular maintenance. User research always captures findings that can be put to use in future contexts. For example, if your primary audience phones known colleagues before tapping into your intranet’s search engine, this will reveal system opportunities that will need to be incorporated in the taxonomy, such as support for an expert locator and user profiles.
For a deeper dive into how we use information architecture as the foundation for digital transformation read our whitepaper: "Knowledge is Power: Context-Driven Digital Transformation.