Metadata are the workhorses of a content management system (CMS). Simply put, metadata tell your CMS platform what your content is about and let you do things with your content.

When we work on website redesigns, intranet redesigns, or other content management system projects, one question I frequently hear is, “What’s the difference between content types and taxonomy?” A site map, content types, content models, metadata, and taxonomy are all part of a site’s content structure.

Often I hear, “We want to make the process better, we just don’t know how.” The secret to business process improvement isn’t (just) inviting in an expert who will magically change things. The secret is to know what your process are now so that you can change them.

Many projects fail because they don’t engage the right stakeholders early enough in the process. Depending on the tasks of the project, we would engage different stakeholders for different reasons.

User research allows us to improve our information structures (such as metadata models, data models, websites, intranets) in ways that are helpful to the people using the structure. When I work with clients who are new to user research, they need to know what the process of user research is like and what to expect as an outcome.