Knowledge Article Naming Conventions: What are best practices and what is the value?

[Lauren Methena]

Where has applying a naming convention to your knowledge base articles helped - and where has it not made as much of a difference?

What are some of the biggest gains you've seen from having a naming convention?

What are some of the things you consider when applying a naming convention to your knowledge articles?

Back story: We have both a customer-facing knowledge base and an agent-only/backend base. We've seen the benefit of a simple naming convention in the customer-facing KB. However, in the backend KB, users are more likely to find what they're looking for by searching by topic or category to get more targeted results. There are some assumptions I'm making to reach this conclusion (and admittedly they may not all be correct, such as assuming the backend users will be more sophisticated users than our customers). However, I want to make sure we'll see benefits before putting in the work to update current articles with a new convention. It may be too that different needs between the two KBs may determine a different kind of naming convention for the backend KB.

Just thinking through the process and would appreciate your perspectives! 🙂

Thoughts? Articles? Recommendations? Thank you in advance! -Lauren

[PAWAN K]

Not a surprise!! Many KM implementations faced this challenge. In my earlier company while redesigning the web support experience, our team faced this challenge particularly with Product Taxonomy. For example, when a user needed to create a Case, they had to select their product from a list of 140 product names. The team introduced a two-level hierarchy for product naming, with products having the product features. Keeping the number relevant only, and minimum should help. Our team cut it down to 20. Also, we kept a rule that users (both internal/external) should see the same group of product names within their complete support journey.

For great perspectives on this, I would recommend you a series of articles by Mr.David Kay.

The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 1: Why Should I Care?
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/taxonomies-part-1-so-what

The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 2: What Makes a Good Taxonomy?
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/what-makes-a-good-taxonomy

The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 3: How to Design Them
https://www.dbkay.com/knowledge-representation/taxonomy-design

Contact page: https://www.dbkay.com/contact-us

I'd recommend, when redesigning please involve both internal and external selected super-users of the web-support. They often have the best practical experience ideas. The process takes time, however will be worth.

[Lauren Methena]

Thank you, Pawan! Great resources. Can't wait to dig in!

[David Kay]

(Thanks, @PAWAN K!)  I did want to confirm what you meant by "Naming Convention." though, @Lauren Methena...were these blog posts what you were looking for, or were you thinking about short descriptions or something else?

[Lauren Methena]

Hi, @PAWAN K  and @David Kay ! Yes, these articles were helpful. They didn't provide the whole solution - and some of it was a bit more detailed than what we needed (since we're coming up with a KB naming convention vs. SharePoint or another filing system). However, I got some helpful ideas and perspective from these articles. So, thank you both for sharing!

What I'm talking to my boss about right now (2 days ago - haha!) is doing a combination of things.

Challenge - we have 2 main ways we can categorize articles: by the user group that needs the info and by usage (primarily case/ticketing system vs. knowledge article).

While changing up the categories themselves would actually be the best practice here for our purposes, no one wants to put that effort into things.

So, what we're talking about is creating a couple of subcategories to existing categories for articles separated by usage - and then a naming convention in the title for user groups (to give them a visual cue that it's for them).

This strategy will probably still evolve, but it feels much farther along than it did before!

So, thank you for your help!

Cheers!

-Lauren