Redesigning an e-business taxonomy: Egreetings project case study

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Jun/Jul 2002 by Farnum, Chris

VOCABULARY CONTROL AND DESIGN ON THE WEB

As a consultant with Argus Associates in 2000, months before the full impact of the dotcom avalanche was felt, I had the chance to work on a project that would make any information architect salivate. Besides the fun of visiting San Francisco and getting to know a truly hip e-commerce company from the inside, I got to help Egreetings (http://www.Egreetings.com) with a redesign effort to improve the number of online greetings sent by users. At the time, Egreetings was generally ranked third among online greeting sites (behind Blue Mountain and American Greetings). The company's core content was its collection of online greeting cards comprising flash animations, animated GIF images and still images. Some were created inhouse by a highly talented team of graphic design artists, and the rest, such as cartoons from the New York Times, were licensed art from outside sources. Anywhere from 40,000 to 200,000 cards were sent each day depending on the season. Argus was called in by Tim Scheele, the senior director of publishing, to help with a number of goals:

* Increase card sending statistics

* Reorganize the card collection (taxonomy/controlled vocabulary)

* Improve navigation and searching

* Suggest key places for ads and promotions (need to "monetize")

* Find an approach for music greeting collection

* Improve the checkout process

Challenges and Approach

The team consisted of four Argonauts: a lead information architect (myself), an assisting information architect (Michele de la Iglesia), a project manager (Shawn Stemen) and a usability specialist who advised us (Keith Instone). We faced a number of challenges during the project. We needed to influence a very fast moving organization. Egreetings truly operated on "Internet time," and could implement suggestions very quickly. On the other hand, it was a challenge to keep up with them and to ask them to take time to wait for the results of our research and design efforts before jumping to a decision. The project was deadline driven. We began work on our strategy and recommendations in Spring 2000 with the target of a Fall 2000 re-launch. Another issue was that it was important for us to reconcile need to "merchandise" with need to organize and index content from an information science perspective.

An information architect's approach should involve an investigation of the content, the organizational context and the users. Often the user research part of the methodology gets less emphasis than it deserves because of time and budget constraints. However, this project incorporated user testing and research during each phase. Therefore, it was a wonderful opportunity for me as an information architect to learn how to include usability testing practices such as card sorting into my methodology.

Investigating the Taxonomy

The Egreetings site had always relied on a taxonomy of categories for its online greetings. The term taxonomy is used somewhat loosely here, because the site does not obey the rules of a classic taxonomy, which places all items into one and only one node. Egreetings approached the arrangement of cards as merchandising, rather than classification, so they often placed items in more than one place. The categories and sub-categories of cards on the site are analogous to the aisles and placards in a traditional paper greeting card store. The organization scheme is based on a combination of logical arrangement and marketing goals. For example, both Egreetings and a traditional store would need to feature seasonal holiday cards. One of the main problems with the site, which the company identified by analyzing the server logs, was that many users abandoned the site without selecting a card to send. They decided to call in the information architects to help make it easier for users to find cards by improving the way the content would be organized by categories.

There were a number of steps we took before any kind of face-to-face user research. We examined the existing taxonomy and explored the site. Next we did a comparison with competitor sites' categories. At this point we already knew that there was too much overlap among the meanings of the categories on the Egreetings site and also that many cards were being placed into too many categories. The meanings of the categories in the taxonomy were diluted. We saw that the taxonomy was a combination of many different types of organization schemes with no coherent overall theme.

We also performed content analysis by closely examining a representative sample of about 100 cards sent to us on CDROM. For each we assigned relevant indexing keyword terms that came to mind such as birthday, dog or humorous. The goal in this exercise was to identify as many possible distinct facets of the cards as we could. Some of the ones that we found included "reason to send" (or occasion), recipient, sender, gender, format (animated vs. still image), card text message, card image content (birthday cakes, babies, baseball) and emotions. At the end of this round of research we knew that we had several key design questions: