:: Two-minute taxonomies

Did you ever need to develop an information architecture or taxonomy, but had no budget or time for primary research? I'm sure this is your situation in over half of your projects.

There are some really "down and dirty" tricks to develop meaningful taxonomies for a given topic or concept...check it out:

1. Let's say you need to develop an information architecture for a disease awareness website. Use the Overture keyword tool to find the most popular, related searches to the disease. These popular searches represent what active information seekers are actually looking for related to your topic! Use these topic modifiers as primary or secondary level category headers in your IA.

2. Cheat. If you are designing an e-commerce experience related to music, or other products, use "E-bay categories." E-bay's taxonomies are honed through community submission of auction items. You can bet that these organizational schemes represent the most commonly thought-of subdivisions of any given consumer-goods category.

There is no replacing primary research, but you don't always have to start from scratch. Remember, you can always push for taxonomy validation tests prior to design.

Jonathan Lupo - VP / Information Architecture - Empathy Lab