Optimizing User Experience: Strategies for Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Visualizations

Table of Contents

Background

Sessions

Keynote: Jason Sack

Define experience and information for your organization

The brain and locating actual value for users

Amount of information that reaches consciousness

Keep users in their own flow

Architecture of experience

Wireframes, flows, taxonomies

Define your primary case

Breakout #1: Taxonomies

What are the core goals for the company.

Issue at CMO is that Product focus is on new features rather than the full view of the site.

How to build the taxonomy

This has be something that crosses most of the organization and not just for a point in time.

What is the governance project

How is the taxonomy changes. What are the downstream technical impacts.

Negotiating Technical and Ontology Team differences

Marketing, Brand/User Research, Product, Technical, Operations, etc. are done before taxonomy generation for enterprise projects.

Sometimes the best approach is to just reorganize.

Synonyms and preferred terms

As a pitch at the C level one doesn't use taxonomies or ontology generation: use customer satisfaction, information management, SEO, acquisition, etc.

What are the key points that could block a project

Mostly technical; the abstract design isn't likely an issue.

Meta-data smack-downs

Internal fights about structure generally erupts as new Product owners are given control over site areas.

Taxonomies vs. facets

Useful when the permutations of the available facets would be excessive.

Folksonomies

Mostly useful as a way to source the terms associated with the taxonomy. The example in the past would be using keywords and query logs as the basis for the facets or SEO optimization.

Breakout #2: Ontology and Implementation

Breakout #3: Wow! in UX

What is moment of awe

Breakout #4: Visualization Design

Author: Jason Walsh

j@wal.sh

Last Updated: 2025-07-30 13:45:27

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