Hi Milan,
I did a lot of similar work at my last employer (100K+ user portal with what
appears to be a similar taxonomy). Here are some thoughts that might help
(or not =]):
Separating the taxonomy into large chunks like "Work" and "Personal" only
works for very obvious things. When you get into things like fitness
programs and blood donation drives, people have a real hard time knowing
whether to look under Work or Personal.
Some of the terms in your Work list are very hard to define, and may
comprise components of larger processes - which basically means people may
not think to look under Collaboration if they want to share documents with
their team. We found when we described processes rather than technologies
or application-sets, people had a much easier time finding them ("Manage a
Project" is where you go to request conference lines, document and meeting
management space, rather than Collaboration, then Connectivity). On the
other hand, we always had to provide a second perspective for those who look
for specific apps or technologies. That is, 2 routes to the same thing are
usually better than one. My own pet peeve: The word Collaboration could
conceivably mean any kind of communication, same for Tools, Resources, and
Functions. These are useful "bucket words" but people tend to pile things
in them that don't make sense after awhile. Eventually, you have to go to
all 4 places to find what you need.
"My Profile (HR)" describes an organizational definition of what comprises
my profile, which may or may not include work contact information or my
expertise. If people perceive that the HR profile doesn't contain
everything about them, it helps to lead people to the "other profiles" (e.g.
My HR Information, My Contact Information, My Professional Information).
We tested the terms "Resources" and "Employee Resources" with about 40
different people in one of our taxonomy iterations, and most people had a
hard time understanding what would be contained there. Opinions varied, but
one theme many people said was "Resources means people, I don't want to
request people..." and they ignored it. The former name for this category
was "Work and Life", but we assumed that "Employee Resources" would be more
obvious. Turns out that wasn't the case.
One other note about the Workplace category: I don't know how big the
company is, or how refined your taxonomy will be, but only in a small-ish
company would folks be able to meet "all of their workplace needs" under one
category called Workplace. People use a tremendous number of resources in
their daily lives, much of it is either offline or outside the company's
domain. Just be careful to use terms that make sense out of context and
don't attempt to be the one place to go when that's not really true. My
last company had one web page called TotalReward, meant to encompass all of
your benefits, when it should really have been called "Some of the rewards
we could fit on a web page".
Good luck, that's a fun project =]
Bryan
http://www.bryanminihan.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Milan
Guenther
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 3:44 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] portal taxonomy
hi everybody,
I am currently working on a high-level menu structure for an employee
portal, using a top-down approach.
We are trying to create a set of generic menu items (or menu folders)
where applications, resources etc. are being placed according to a
user's business roles.
The first approach:
Workplace
Collaboration
Reporting
Tools
Workflow
...
Personal Data
My Profile (HR)
Travel Information
Reset Password
...
Resources
Business Areas
Corporate Functions
...
If there is anybody experienced in such a project would like to share
thoughts and ideas, please let me know.
best regards
milan
--
milan guenther * interaction design
||| | | |||| || |||||||| | || | ||
designing the information workplace
+49 173 285 66 89 * www.guenther.cx
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