Organising and describing content

A workshop by Mags Hanley

Do any of these problems resonate?

• Looking for a navy shirt on a fashion web site. Is a top, blouse, shirt or all three? Do you look for neutrals, blues or darks?
• You want to go dancing on the weekend. How do you identify the club plays the type of music you like?
• You are launching a new web site for your company and want to get the site up the Search Engine Rankings, but are not sure how to do it.

In this workshop, Mags Hanley will help you to understand what these problems are and how describing content will help your users find the information they want.

The workshop will be a combination of hands-on exercises, and learning the theory to back-up your design decisions.

At the beginning of the workshop we will identify a problem to be solved and by the end of the morning, have a sketched out application leveraging taxonomies and metadata.

Workshop agenda

Introductions and naming yourself exercise

• How do you describe yourself and how does that relate to the others in the workshop

The description theory

• Understanding how people naturally organise and label the world
• The types of description and when to use them
• Standardisation vs. ad hoc (or the battle between taxonomies and folksonomies)
• Metadata vs. taxonomies vs. structure

Exercise – Analysing search logs

Using organisation and description within web sites

• Navigation
• Feeds
• Search

Designing an event application

Wrap-up - Organisation scheme BINGO