Why is a taxonomy important? Our clients needed to know. They’d never worked on a web project before and didn’t understand why we couldn’t just add new top-level pages to their site whenever the need arose. We’d presented a ton of visuals but they couldn’t grasp how the taxonomy blended with UX and design to create their new site’s structure. Before the project started to unravel, we decided have an in-person meeting to show them why a taxonomy is important.

A taxonomy is the subtle, powerful organizing force behind every site. Like content audits, I love them. Creating a good taxonomy is like couture tailoring: if you take the time to do it well even the most complicated designs and interactions will seamlessly fall into place at launch. Your site will be forever fabulous, or at least manageable until the next redesign.

How I create a taxonomy

Here’s how I create a taxonomy. Oh and it’s rarely a solo effort – I always create them in lockstep with UX, business analyst, and design colleagues. After an audit I look at the content we’re going to work with and start grouping stuff into logical categories (also known as “big buckets”). Once that dust settles I take another pass at everything to see if I can break the big categories into smaller sub-categories. I also start making a preliminary list of tags that will be used later on in the project. Along the way I gut check everything with my colleagues with questions such as:

• How many elements will the top-level nav bar hold? What do the comps look like?
• Do these categories feel right? Do you think the site visitors will look for information this way?
• Does this go with that? Should we break this sub-category out, or does it make more sense to keep everything together?

I give the categories and subcategories names and put them into a hierarchy that reflects the site structure and design. Depending on the project I also start mapping how the site content will be tagged later on. It’s really all sketching at this point, and I track everything in Excel along the way.

What a taxonomy looks like

Back to our client. They understood that things had to be grouped into categories according to some kind of order on the site, but they kept getting confused when we showed them the results. I wanted to illustrate the difference between categories, the highest organizing factor on the site, and tags – the secondary, flexible labels that would assign content to the main categories. (This particular site didn’t have enough content to create sub-categories). I knew the examples I’d used weren’t making my point clear, so I decided to take a detour and show them what a taxonomy looks like in action.

I chose Zappos as my example. Why? It was a brand everyone’s familiar with, and Zappos does an excellent job of grouping a TON of information into high-level categories in way that doesn’t overwhelm site visitors. While I didn’t do any content strategy for Zappos, based on their home page I could immediately see what their taxonomy looked like. I took a screen shot of their home page and highlighted their top-level categories in blue, and highlighted the tags (or sub-categories) that populate the top-level categories in green. To my eyes, this is the little black dress of taxonomies.

The screen shot was worth a million words during our client meeting. It helped me illustrate how their taxonomy would inform their site’s structure. Zappos uses nine top-level categories as the foundation for their site. These are the big buckets, and each one has a simple label that makes it easy to start looking for what you want. Next, they group products into a more defined list of tags (or sub-categories) that will help you find things even faster.

I’m thrilled to say this helped our clients understand how a taxonomy works. They saw that adding top-level pages would overwhelm users and make it more difficult to find content, and understood how tagging would surface relevant content on different pages. As of this writing the project’s in the design phase, and I can’t wait to see it go live later this year. Need help noodling a taxonomy? Get in touch.