This U.S.-based member-driven professional organization needed to create an enterprise taxonomy to consolidate their information resources and make better use of their limited financial resources. With a limited budget, this organization needed to be targeted with their efforts. We created a taxonomy strategy outlining how the taxonomy would be structured and developed. This helped the client agree to the tasks and the best use of budget.

Before digging into taxonomy development, we ran online card sorting to see how members would organize these different terms. Because the topics were relatively focused, we were able to glean a lot of good terms and groupings from this card sorting that we used in the taxonomy development. After this development, we ran online task testing, analyzed the results, and made adjustments to the taxonomy terms.

Results

At the end of the project, the client had a solid enterprise taxonomy they could use across their organization. They had consolidated the different taxonomies used by the different groups, strategically planned the taxonomy, developed it consistently, and validated it through testing. The client was very pleased with the process and the work.