Redesigning an e-business taxonomy: Egreetings project case study

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

Our findings provided us with the confidence to make some important design recommendations. For example, one of our biggest surprises was that the image content facet was less important than anticipated, while emotion or tone was one of the first things that users noticed about a card. When users first saw cards the first words out of their mouths involved emotions the majority of the time. Most of the time they seemed to add up all of the audiovisual components and immediately assign concepts such as "happy" or "funny" or "sincere." However, when they had difficulty determining the emotion conveyed by a card, they often commented that they did not like it. We concluded that the emotion facet is one of the most important factors for users when they are deciding whether or not to send a particular card. In addition we found that the format of the card was also an important part of people's card selection decision. They also alerted us to some distinctions in format that we had not previously considered. For instance they differentiated between still image cards that contained cartoon illustrations versus those that contained photography. Despite the finding from the keyword exercise, we concluded that the site's taxonomy should not be arranged from the top down by emotion or format. The results of the card sorting analysis showed us that users have a mental model of the organization of cards that is strongly tied to the "reason to send," whether it is a birthday or just to say "hello" to a friend. This "reason to send" facet manifested clearly in our cluster analysis. The Egreetings site was already largely organized according to this scheme, but our findings helped to validate the approach and gave us the insights we needed to make improvements.

Based on these findings we made a number of recommendations to conclude the strategy and recommendations phase. We drafted a revision of the top level for the site's taxonomy and recommended that they make it more consistent by focusing on "reason to send." We suggested that the facets "recipient" and "card image content" be used as a means to systematically subdivide lower level categories in the site. The "emotion" and "format" were to be used as additional metadata indexing elements separate from the "reason to send" taxonomy so that users could filter, narrow and search according to these secondary facets.

Furthermore, we encouraged them to create controlled vocabularies for these facets so the cards could be consistently indexed. We also delivered wireframes at this point, including one for the new main page of the site to show how to integrate our taxonomy suggestions into the site.

Unfortunately the filtering and searching recommendations were never implemented, but our recommendations led directly to a next phase of our project in which we completely reworked the Egreetings taxonomy and provided indexing and classification guidelines. Our work was really just beginning when we delivered out initial recommendations to Egreetings in the spring of 2000. Eventually they resulted in the re-launch of the site in October 2000 in time for Halloween. Whenever a website has a major makeover, it is normal to expect that users will encounter difficulties and some traffic loss will happen. In this case, traffic statistics actually improved as well as the overall ratio of cards sent per visitor. I am certain that the time and effort we spent in learning about how the site's users think about online greetings was a key factor in this successful outcome.