Determining Knowledge Categories for End Users

[SuzyH_]

Does anyone have any suggestions for end user categories as far as grouping knowledge articles?

[David Kay]

You're right; it's incredibly important to have your taxonomies / categories aligned (not necessarily identical) across the enterprise, or to have a really good reason not to.  For example, I recently facilitated a taxonomy workshop that not only included tech support, but development and the CFO, too.  The CFO wanted to make sure that his financial reporting was in sync with the rest of the company's product breakdown.

[David Kay]

Here's a series of blog posts with the why, what, and how of determining categories for knowledge base content.  (They use the term "taxonomy" for category.)  The "how" part is basically the agenda for our taxonomy workshops.

If I had to pull out one piece of advice, it's to think outside-in (how do your users think about the world?) and not inside-out (how are we organized, or how do we think about the work we do.)  Engaging users in designing categories is both extremely helpful and fun, using techniques like card sorting.

Please let me know if you have any specific questions!
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/taxonomies-part-1-so-what
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/what-makes-a-good-taxonomy
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/taxonomy-design

[mamor]

Thanks David!!

I already read them last week and they are very insightful 👍.

Now, if I consider your last advice: in my case, I'm drawing categories for a KB for an internal IT dept delivering IT services. Should I then invite 1-2 people from our client base to attend a workshop and give us their outside-in?

This could differ from person-to-person since it depends on their personal perspective. So it might get pretty subjective.  Where do you draw the line and keep some control? 

[Vickie Runyon]

I'm playing the part of devil's advocate here... 

I'm finding categories less and less important with the advent of AI search tools (and search tools in general). Most knowledge bases these days include a robust search engine that is likely using AI to 'learn' what people are looking for and serve up the best results. ServiceNow's AI Search engine does not use the category as a factor in the search results. Also, the category may not even be visible to the searcher. In our Employee Center experience, we do not have the Category filter visible, nor is the category visible to the reader when they view an article.

So, in my case, the categories are most used by me when I need to group articles in a list in the platform for some purpose (for example, finding articles for a certain application that need to be updated due to an upgrade).

[mamor]

Interesting.

But then how is your KB organised? What does it look like when we access the front-page? Is it all articles in bulk, with a search bar?