Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Information Architecture

  • Taxonomies: A Trilogy – The What, the Why, and the Will

    This blog is part 1 of a trilogy on Taxonomies. Read part 2 on Common Taxonomy Mistakes or part 3 on How to Evaluate and Test Taxonomies if you want to skip ahead.

    What the hell are taxonomies? How do taxonomies work? Why are taxonomies important to effective web design?

    This post will tackle these questions and more as an introduction to taxonomies. In two follow up posts, we will cover:

    • Common misconceptions about taxonomies as well as best practices.
    • Techniques to test taxonomies to ensure they’re working and how to fix them if they are not.

    Let’s begin with where the word “taxonomy” came from.

    Origins of the Term Taxonomy

    The first use of the word taxonomy dates back to ancient Greece, by none other than Aristotle. He developed the concept as a way to classify organisms. This later evolved and became known as scientific classification.

    In taxonomy’s scientific classification system, each species has a set of specific categorizations. Each category is unique to only one specie. In other words, each organism has a unique combination of many things that identify it. These include:

    • Domain
    • Kingdom
    • Phylum
    • Class
    • Order
    • Family
    • Genus

    Modern taxonomy definitions apply the same concept of classification to different fields. For example, the Drupal definition explains taxonomy as a way of classifying content. This is the most common in the marketing space, as marketers generally don’t deal with species. But, this definition can be too broad at times as there are many ways of classifying content. The process can encompass everything, from hierarchical relationships to faceted classifications. We’ll be focusing on how marketers and web designers use taxonomies. This will allow us to better understand their nature and purpose.

    How to Properly Use a Taxonomy

    One of the main purposes of a taxonomy is to dictate a website’s navigation. While the taxonomy is not the only tool for laying out the navigation, it is an essential aspect. Think of navigation as a map. A taxonomy serves as the instructions and signs that guide you to your destination. As with routes on a map, there can be many different ways to navigate a site and reach the same destination. There could also only be one way. Let’s take a look at two examples of taxonomies and how they impact your user experience.

    Hierarchical Classification System

    Sometimes there is a single route to get from point A to point B on a website. (In our map metaphor, these routes are our back-country roads.) A hierarchical classification system is a perfect example. With this type of taxonomy, there is usually a single way to navigate to a specific page/content. For example, a site containing a food menu dividing up the items by Meats, Fruits, and Vegetables. This is a hierarchical classification system.

    Each food item falls under a specific category. This is the same as the scientific classification hierarchy. A cabbage can’t be a meat. An apple can’t be a vegetable. A hierarchical classification system such as this,works well for simpler sites. But, what if you need to accommodate a more complex user journey? You will need a more flexible type of taxonomy.

    Faceted Classification System

    Another taxonomy example is a faceted classification. This taxonomy can direct you to the same content through different paths. It organizes content on many dimensions or facets. A facet is “any of the definable aspects that make up a subject or an object.” Unlike Aristotle’s classification taxonomy, a faceted classification does not have to be hierarchical. A good example of a faceted classification system is Zappos’ shoe filtering scheme.

    In this case, there are plenty of navigation routes (read: filters) to get to the same shoe. For example, a user can find a pair of size 8 Nike running shoes on the Zappos site by any descriptive search. The user could search for a size 8 under the size filter or Nike under the brand filter. They could even search for Sneakers and Athletic Shoes under the Category filter. All three filters will bring up the same Nike size 8 running shoes. Yet, each search will be different. Not all size 8 shoes are Nike and not all Nike shoes are sneakers and athletic shoes.

    Taxonomies Help Users Find What They Want

    Adding proper taxonomies to your site’s content provides an effective UX. Your users follow digital signposts to find what they are looking for. Without the proper structure from taxonomies, your site navigation can be a pain. This can lead to the loss of users.

    There are more types of classifications out there. But the two examples above provide a good understanding of how taxonomies work in web design. Get ready for the second part of this trilogy! We’ll discuss common taxonomy misconceptions and best practices.
     
    Any questions? We’ve got your back.

     

  • ABT Modernizes Site for NC Department of Revenue

    Atlantic BT is proud to announce the launch of the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s new website. A partnership that began in 2015 (as ABT was collaborating with NC.gov) has come to fruition with a stronger and more streamlined DOR site that provides easier access for both taxpayers and DOR staff.

    Because of the many rules and processes of NC tax policy, the restructuring of the DOR site required ABT to tackle complex situations with nuance and care. Our team conducted extensive research to ascertain the needs of taxpayers as well as internal users who maintained the site. This research led us to shift the web experience to focus on the tasks users wanted to accomplish on the site rather than the identity of the users themselves. This task-oriented approach became a defining characteristic of the project.

    User Research Provides Answers for State Government

    Using Tree Test Diagrams developed from an in-depth persona workshop, our designers created an ideal path for different users to follow when visiting the DOR site. The UX needed to be just as clear for a user looking for general information as it was to a taxpayer who had a specific issue to be addressed.

    Tree test example of NC tax return access
    This tree test shows possible user paths for checking the status of an NC tax return.

    Keeping this in mind, we migrated the site over to a new platform powered by Drupal. This gave internal users more autonomy and flexibility, making it easier to update the site as technology and tax laws changed. At the same time, Drupal enabled strong governance over the different internal users to ensure their updates fit the larger vision of the department. Redesigned information architecture, which was now data-informed rather than data-driven, also established much needed clarity to enhance the user experience across the site.

    New Offerings on NCDOR.gov

    Everyone has a story of a tax situation gone awry. Our Research Manager Randy Earl shared one that he experienced while he was working on this project:

    “Resolving complex tax issues can often feel like being trapped in an endless loop of frustration,” he said. “Finding the right information and understanding the process can make all the difference; that’s why making this site stronger and more accessible for taxpayers is so important.”  

    The new user interface for NCDOR.gov
    Data-informed information architecture powered this new user interface for NCDOR.gov.

    The new DOR site will now lead users exactly to where they need to be and create opportunities for tax issues to be remedied easily for everyone involved. Atlantic BT achieved this with:

    • A reorganized and modernized web interface with user-friendly access to essential pages.
    • A shared design platform with other NC Government branches for clarity and unity.
    • Mobile-friendly site capabilities.
    • Updated technology with the ability to maintain pace with ever-changing user needs and tax laws.

    Tax related stress is no joke. That’s why the DOR wanted to ensure that its new design prioritized the user, making the entire process as simple as possible and perhaps even enjoyable. Atlantic BT is proud to work alongside the DOR and looks forward to future collaborations to build NC.gov sites that support and empower the people of North Carolina.    

  • 5 Content Strategy Tactics for Higher Ed Sites

    Tips and Tech to Graduate Your Content to a Higher Level

    Your higher ed website is more than just text and images. Done right, your university site is a digital canvas that allows your users to find and enjoy the content and information they need. Done wrong, and your visitors will bounce from your school’s homepage immediately and just ask Google where the right content is hidden.

    Intro to Content Strategy is over. It’s time to advance your college website with user research, analytics, and technology that graduates your content to a higher plane:

    1. Study your higher ed audience(s).

    Great content strategy begins with user research. Google Surveys and Survey Monkey make it easy to gather feedback from the kinds of students and visitors you want. It’s also smart to run stakeholder interviews in and outside your university or school to learn more about potential improvements to your design and content.

    2. Higher ed users think, act, or learn differently, so give them options.

    Some skip the top-level navigation to click on images. Others lock onto your search function as soon as your homepage loads. You want to design an open content strategy so it’s easy for any higher ed user to find the right content no matter how they search for it.

    3. High-performers know the importance of testing their content.

    Even in an academic setting, nothing published online is meant to last forever. This makes it crucial to always measure the performance of your content so you know what to alter and improve. Even if you don’t run formal user testing, enable Google Analytics on your university sites to monitor how each page performs.

    4. Teach stakeholders to manage their own content—with governance.

    The more you empower each team in your college or organization to create, edit, and share their own content, the more you can think strategically about how to lead your organization’s outreach. This takes a flexible CMS with strong content governance and guidelines—for example, that’s why 7 of the top 10 universities in the world rely on Drupal.

    5. Design with search in mind.

    A huge portion of your users will arrive on your pages after Googling what they need. You want to make sure they find what they want by using accurate headings and subheadings based on a tested and approved taxonomy. Also, please don’t forget meta description text!

    Technology for Higher Ed Content

    At any stage in designing a higher ed site, there are a number of cloud-based tools available to make your strategy work easier. Content audit tools like Blaze can not only perform crawls of all your pages, but also make it simple for your entire team to share one view of any domain. This builds a powerful consensus on how to best optimize content across your site.

    And once you have the right content in place, you want to ensure it loads as quickly as possible. While you can’t control the bandwidth on your users’ Internet connections, setting up a good Content Delivery Network can cache your content and deliver better load times. We prefer Amazon Web Services CloudFront for our websites, but explore your options to find the right CDN for you.

    Finally, if you want stakeholders across your organization to contribute content, you need a platform that both facilitates publishing and enables flexible governance. GatherContent is our favorite example; this web application lets you rapidly produce new pages according to preferred templates, then define which users have editing and publishing privileges.

    If any of this inspires questions, our content strategists will be delighted to help you with advice. Just drop us a line and we’ll get right back to you.

  • Thirst for Knowledge Recap: Content Strategy for Large Organizations

    From running content audits to organizing a redirects plan, the latest Thirst for Knowledge showed all the complexity inside a strong Content Strategy. Led by former ABT Marketing Lead Tori Pratt and ABT Head of Project Management Daniel Hooks (filling in for Haven Hottel from Campbell University), this Thirst for Knowledge unpacked some of the most difficult stages of crafting content strategy for large organizations.

    Using Campbell University’s recent redesign as a working example, this presentation showed how to integrate content audits, content analysis, and content governance on a large-scale redesign with multiple organizational stakeholders. Here are the full slides and audio from the presentation:

    The event also included an in-house demo station from Blaze, the cloud-based content audit platform which powered our content strategy for Campbell University. Two lucky attendees from Saint Augustine University and Durham-based ArchiveSocial won a free three-month subscription to Blaze’s content audit service.

    As you plan content for your organization, we don’t want you to have to tackle this complex task on your own. If you have any questions about specific aspects of content strategy and governance, do not hesitate to contact us for help.

     

  • How ABT Empowered Campbell.edu to Lead with Purpose

    How Can a Hidden Gem Become a Preeminent Private University?

    130 years after opening, Campbell University was an established presence in NC’s higher education landscape. The Baptist-affiliated private college had graduated generations of state leaders in business, medicine, and law. However, only 19% of American adults had even heard of Campbell University—and several of these incorrectly assumed the college was connected with the soup brand. If the university was going to attract elite students on a national scale, something needed to change. Campbell began this process by hiring a new president, J. Bradley Creed.

    [pull_quote]I have heard others describe Campbell as a hidden gem and the best kept-secret in North Carolina. They meant that as a compliment, but I want people all across North Carolina, the region, and the nation to know the Campbell name and to recognize Campbell as one of the preeminent private universities that prepares students to make a difference in the lives of others through work, service, and leadership. –J. Bradley Creed, President-Campbell University[/pull_quote]

    Because 97% of prospective students begin their college search by visiting that university’s website, Campbell needed its website to excite and engage students with a meaningful experience that captured the “feel” of Campbell’s campus and student life. It was also vital for the site to be easy to navigate across Campbell’s different programs as well as optimized for mobile users (mobile traffic to Campbell.edu had increased 1277% since 2011). This inspired the president’s new initiative: a major rebranding and new design for Campbell.edu to expand the university’s reputation across the country. The university chose Atlantic BT as their digital partner to handle the rebrand and site design. 

    [pull_quote]When we started our conversation with Campbell, what really helped ABT stand out was our proven process for tackling this kind of large scale initiative with multiple stakeholders. Our experience around user research was especially compelling. They had multiple stakeholders across their vast program offerings and alumni, and we wanted all of them to feel represented by the new site and brand. To make that happen, we designed digital surveys, brand workshops, interviews, and test groups to get a 360 view of Campbell’s identity. This in-depth research guided all of our design and brand work. –Eric Lloyd, Senior Business Development Manager -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Designing and Developing Campbell’s New Digital Ecosystem

    The scope of ABT’s redesign required a new navigation, search capabilities, and reimagined user experience (for both desktop and mobile). Our aim was to give Campbell.edu a new digital ecosystem that would help Campbell compete with leading universities. Key to this objective was the development of a strong content strategy—analyzing which pages, images, and videos would do the most to engage Campbell’s audience and organizing these assets accordingly. 

    [pull_quote]It all started with discovery. To create a content strategy for the new site, we worked with Campbell to identify and audit over 8,000+ unique web pages and construct a site architecture that satisfied the needs of the individual schools and their users. We put a lot of effort into streamlining the content, simplifying the navigation, and creating an experience that is logical and intuitive. –Tyler Slocum, Digital Marketing Strategist -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Throughout this process, it was essential for ABT to have a deep understanding of Campbell’s needs and regular communication with their stakeholders. Campbell’s internal marketing team visited the ABT office at least once a week throughout the project; we also used our Mavenlink project management tool to regularly share research results, user test findings, site mock ups, and other work-in-progress elements of the new Campbell.edu. 

    [pull_quote]Good communication and collaboration is the bread-and-butter of any large project, especially one as massive as the Campbell brand and site redesign. Our in-house work sessions with the Campbell marketing and communications team combined with the digital immediacy of Mavenlink did a lot to keep us on the same page. Thanks to our collaborative process, we completed the redesign and launch of the new Campbell.edu in less than eight months. –Townsley Minton, Director of Client Success -Atlantic BT[/pull_quote]

    Modernizing the Brand for an Established University

    Beyond the redesign of Campbell.edu, the university wanted to give its community a unified brand vision with a statement and symbol that would represent the essence of Campbell. ABT met this challenge with a variety of research methods mixed with a testing-driven creative approach. 

    [pull_quote]For branding research, it is really important to be both quantitative and qualitative. For example, we designed several surveys measuring how many people across the state, region, and country had heard of Campbell University; among those who knew of the university, I measured what words they commonly associated with the school. This helped us understand existing perceptions of Campbell so we knew which qualities to emphasize and which needed adjusting at a brand level. –Natalie Iannello, Lead Digital Marketer -AtlanticBT [/pull_quote]

    The ABT marketing team worked with these research insights along with a series of interviews and collaborative sessions with the Campbell team to craft new messaging and a new icon for the university. Because the Campbell team wanted to balance their Christian identity with the desire to recruit elite students of all faith backgrounds, they needed a brand that would resonate with both kinds of audience. 

    [pull_quote]From our research into higher ed, we saw ‘leadership’ and ‘future leaders’ as familiar terms to describe the kinds of driven, elite students Campbell wanted to recruit. That said, integrating Campbell’s Christian element with respect and the right amount of distance was harder—we wanted to imply the service and selflessness of faith without alienating people who weren’t religious. Ultimately, we tried out different terms with Campbell stakeholders and landed on the word “purpose.” Purpose described the reason why people of faith lived as they did, but purpose wasn’t confined to religious people. Because this word resonated with both audiences without alienating them, it led to the tagline ‘Leading with Purpose.’ –Lorelei Canne, Content Editor -AtlanticBT[/pull_quote]

    On the visual side, the Campbell team requested a new icon with a more recognizable connection to the university. Their team wanted the new unified mark to better capture people’s attention with a symbol that was unique to Campbell and representative of their school’s history and tradition of academic excellence. 

    [pull_quote]We went through a lot of iterations with the Campbell team to help them develop the right icon. They needed a visual idea that would work for the goals of the Campbell marketing team and Campbell’s graduates, students, and community. After a lot of interviews and surveys, we landed on Campbell’s Kivett Hall as a landmark that really captured the university’s identity and history. After all, it’s the oldest building on their campus, and everyone at Campbell recognized it. Next, we helped their team produce and test out several different designs to find the icon that they ultimately landed on, which was modern and fresh-looking while being recognizable to the community. –Mark Riggan, Senior Full Stack Designer -AtlanticBT[/pull_quote]

    The New Icon – Kivett Hall

    KivettIcon1

    Partnering for the Future of Campbell

    Now that the new Campbell.edu and brand have launched, ABT and Campbell University will continue their partnership on Campbell’s digital properties. ABT’s team is currently at work auditing and providing insight for the university’s updates to its sites for the law school, divinity school, and adult & online education programs.

    In the meantime, check out the new Campbell.edu and read their introduction to the new brand and site design—let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

  • ABT to Relaunch Blaze Content Platform

    After years of experience in content strategy and technology leadership, Atlantic BT is proud to add a powerful new tool to our arsenal of expertise. We acquired Blaze’s automated content audit platform after using it to audit and analyze the web content for some of our top clients.

    abtblaze

    What Is Blaze?

    This new content audit platform will be Atlantic BT’s first software-as-a-service, giving us a new and versatile way to empower our clients with digital content strategy. Blaze automates the process of crawling a web domain and sorting its pages into appropriate categories. The platform also makes it easy to share notes, insights, and ideas across a team with universal dashboards and communication tools.

    Here’s a short video created by the Blaze team to explain how the platform works:

    Blaze and Atlantic BT

    Atlantic BT’s employees led the way in ABT acquiring Blaze, having relied on the platform for their content audit work for multiple clients. According to Senior Writer/Content Strategist Allan Maule:

    “It’s a really stellar tool. When I’m reviewing a client’s existing content and webpages, Blaze makes it simple for me to assess everything a client has put out into the world, how well it’s gathering traffic, and share my notes on every relevant detail with the rest of my team. I’m looking forward to seeing how my programming colleagues make this tool even better.”

    Atlantic BT’s developers are already at work adding new features and capabilities to Blaze, as well as improving the interface of the platform. Look for more details about these improvements later this year, with demos to begin in November.

    “We could not be more excited to add Blaze to our digital solutions at Atlantic BT,” said ABT VP of Experience Eileen Allen, “Both current and future Blaze users have a lot to look forward to when we relaunch the platform.”

    For more details on Blaze, visit www.blazecontent.com.