This is done so that if you’re looking for something specific you can find it through the navigation. If we translate this to a website example, all blogs, including XD Ideas, have a ‘taxonomy’ to organize the articles within. The more granular your taxonomy is, the more specific a user’s search can be. Depending on the granularity we wish to classify items in our store we may add additional child levels in the tree. Looking at ‘Type’ there may be a classification for shorts, pants, shirts, dresses, and jackets. Within color, size and type, there are ‘children’ categories. If those clothing items were arranged at random, with sizes mixed together, shorts and shirts mixed up, and no apparent order to the chaos – your shopping experience would likely be less than ideal. Imagine that you’ve walked into a physical store which had clothing of all sizes, colors and materials. The bridge between the analog and digital world is not a far leap. Whether you’re running a blog, an e-commerce site or a web-app, having a clear, intuitive structure to your information will not only help you, but will help your customers accomplish their goals. Organizing information on your website or digital product is critical to its success.

To learn more about information architecture and the other aspects like sitemaps and hierarchy, visit this introduction to information architecture.

In this post we’ll explore how taxonomies and metadata can help you structure and organize your information, and think about your design. You may be familiar with the idea of metadata if you’ve spent time coding websites, or optimizing for search, as it’s leveraged by search engines like Google to understand what information exists on a website. Though there are many aspects of information architecture to consider, two in particular are important for the cataloguing and organization of information, Taxonomies and Metadata.

Iconjar developers metadata