Linear books to open world adventure
- 1. From Linear Books to an Open World Adventure A case study of taxonomy to drive interactive, personalized reader experiences Joe Pairman
- 5. The starting point: legacy, book- oriented XML format (DocBook)
- 10. Making content more searchable and helpful
- 11. Taskonomy: simplifying by focusing on user tasks
- 12. Taskonomy: simplifying by focusing on user tasks Top-level tasks: ~ Bridge roles, tools, and environments ~ Roughly correspond to lifecycle
- 13. Top-level tasks used to unify the content
- 14. Insight deep in the hierarchy Users needed to see content related to their task…
- 15. Insight deep in the hierarchy Users needed to see content related to their task… …detailed procedures but also overviews/ scenarios
- 16. Insight deep in the hierarchy Users needed to see content related to their task… …detailed procedures but also overviews/ scenarios
- 17. Insight deep in the hierarchy Users needed to see content related to their task… …detailed procedures but also overviews/ scenarios
- 18. Re-architecting content: a user goal or session per page / URL
- 19. Re-architecting content: a user goal or session per page / URL
- 20. Re-architecting content: a user goal or session per page / URL ~ Good for users ~ Good for Google ~ Good for site search/browsing
- 21. Focused pages reduce duplication & effort~ From a comprehensive user guide per product
- 22. Focused pages reduce duplication & effort~ From a comprehensive user guide per product ~ To a single instance of each task, reducing product-specific instructions to installs, etc.
- 23. Focused pages reduce duplication & effort~ From a comprehensive user guide per product ~ To a single instance of each task, reducing product-specific instructions to installs, etc. ~ Even minor differences covered by generalizing or labels
- 25. Talend still need some similar pages
- 26. As before, variants managed by “profiling”
- 27. Now, profiling sourced from taxonomy
- 28. Now, profiling sourced from taxonomy
- 29. Now, profiling sourced from taxonomy
- 30. Consistent, efficient, and queryable content
- 31. Simple recommendations, based on taxonomy
- 32. Google often gets users to the right area, but~ there also needed to be relevant links between related pages ~ user may land on: – Wrong product variant / version – Detailed procedures (when they need to understand the system a bit first) ~ user often simply needs to research more for a full picture
- 35. Logic for auto related links ~ More relevant than fully automated related links – Human-constructed thesaurus – Human input in tagging ~ Far less creation & maintenance effort than manual links
- 36. “Personal books”
- 37. Lessons learned
- 38. Lessons learned ~ Such rich, granular tagging requires a good team, good training, and a consistent body of content – But it can be achieved by normal human authors ~ Always good to start simple, less coupled, lightly integrated – But know that many content tools are weak at taxonomy/semantics, and plan accordingly ~ Taxonomy and interaction design may well need revisited – Example: expectations around product and module facets
- 39. Products and their modules
- 40. Products and their modules
- 44. Last lesson: there’s always more you can do — once content’s appropriately annotated Version 6.0 Version 6.4 but content is tagged with version, so there’s a base for logic to point Google to the “canonical” page
- 45. The result Working with a taxonomy enables us to bridge silos between cross-format, heterogeneous pieces of content. It is the centerpiece of our top-down and bottom-up navigation. Relations between concepts can be leveraged at any stage of the documentation workflow: at authoring time, before publishing and also to check online content. ~ François Violette, Information Architect, Talend
- 46. Questions / suggestions?~ joepairman@mekon.com ~ @joepairman
Editor's Notes
- #5: Fairly simple taxonomy principles. Deep involvement with content. Findability but also improving the content itself.
- #14: Talend Help Center directly; community not yet
- #19: Not assuming context
- #22: Not just that pages themselves are more searchable; there are fewer of them
- #29: Bit of ontology to support this