Taxonomic Distress: The Challenge of Developing Effective Taxonomies for Web-Facing Businesses

A good taxonomy is a win for both a company and its customers. It’s easy to see why taxonomy development is good for your users: The whole reason for creating a taxonomy for your site is to make information retrieval quick and easy by putting the information into a sensible structure that’s consistently applied. Well-designed taxonomies map out the base structure for your content, providing a navigation scheme that makes sense to your users.

Becker, Lane. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy

Faucet Facets: A Few Best Practices for Designing Multifaceted Navigation Systems

Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that’s often not the case.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy

Tag Clouds for Summarizing Web Search Results  

In this paper, we describe an application, PubCloud that uses tag clouds for the summarization of results from queries over the PubMed database of biomedical literature. PubCloud responds to queries of this database with tag clouds generated from words extracted from the abstracts returned by the query. The results of a user study comparing the PubCloud tag-cloud summarization of query results with the standard result list provided by PubMed indicated that the tag cloud interface is advantageous in presenting descriptive information and in reducing user frustration but that it is less effective at the task of enabling users to discover relations between concepts.

Kuo, Byron Y-L., Thomas Hentrich, Benjamin M. Good and Mark D. Wilkinson. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy