When you deploy Employee Center you can choose to start with the out of the box taxonomy for your topics (part of the demo data) but this may not accurately reflect the breadth of your organization. While ServiceNow conducted user research to develop confidence that the taxonomy is intuitive to navigate for a broad audience of our customers, your unique business may require a different organizing scheme. So, how do you develop your unique taxonomy?
From a User Experience (UX) perspective, including the users in the process of taxonomy development is critical to the outcome resonating with users. There are two key techniques we recommend you perform to design and validate your taxonomy decisions
Card Sorting
 
To understand how your users expect content items to be organized, ask them directly to sort cards into logical groupings. By getting a large sample of how users organize the content items you can make decisions about the taxonomy to deploy. There are two types of card sorts that you can use.
Closed Card Sort: You know the categories within the taxonomy but want users' perspective of how to organize the content within those categories. A closed sort has predefined categories and users are only asked to put the content items into the category that makes the most sense.
Open Card Sort: You have a list of content items and want to see how users organize them into groups and how they name the groups. In an open sort, study participants get to name the categories.
Tree Testing
 
 
To validate the taxonomy you developed - either via card sort or internally, conducting tree testing with a group of users will provide validation on the decisions you made. Participants in the study will complete a series of tasks within the content taxonomy and you will observe their success rates.
Findings from the tree testing may suggest a change to the taxonomy or increase confidence in the proposal.
Learn More
Attached are two articles explaining how to conduct card sorts and tree tests.
