Technical Writing: How to Define Information Architecture

Course details

Are you a technical writer, looking to learn the basics of information architecture? Are you looking for ways to create information that your target audience and easily find and retrieve, so that your user guides turn into "intelligent information"?

To enable the efficient consumption of your software documentation, the customers need to find it in an intuitive way. The art and science of organizing your information deliverables is called information architecture.

One of the most important first steps towards organizing the information architecture is to define the taxonomy you will use to structure and organize this content. You use the taxonomy to define:

- the correct definition of the subjects to be used in a DITA subject scheme map;

- define metadata, needed for machine learning, search, and retrieval;

- define the categories and values used to organize the information on the web page;

- achieve a common understanding and define terminology to be used consistently in the software documentation, the software and the customer's front end - on your web pages

Having high-quality metadata for your content often is the key differentiator between success and failure!

To build high-quality content that is ready to be used in an intelligent way, a technical writer must prepare and provide some form of pre-classified content. The best way to collect and organize such metadata is by developing a taxonomy.

In this course you will learn:

- Which are the benefits you will get from applying the strategies for building taxonomies to your content;

- Understand important terms and their explanations with IT examples;

- 3 specific strategies that will save you a ton of time in creating a taxonomy: using a standard, a description or by comparison;

- What is card sorting technique and how to set up open and closed card sorting workshops to validate the user experience with the information architecture you have defined;

- Which tools to use to design and develop information architecture and taxonomies.

This course DOES NOT COVER:

- How to write in DITA. (This is covered in other courses of JPDocu School of Technical Writing)

- How to create DITA subject scheme maps. (This is covered in other courses of JPDocu School of Technical Writing)

- Deep details on ontologies.

- Advanced tools, metadata repositories, classification engines or servers for storing and handling of metadata, taxonomies or ontologies - this is a getting started course, so such tools and details are not in scope.

- Ontologies and building them - we consider that a student needs to get a good hold on of taxonomies, get practical experience before we can start talking about ontological relations between taxonomies and taxonomy terms.

- Chatbots - although taxonomy is a prerequisite for building decent chatbots, we do not go into details about chatbots in this course.

The instructor of this course, Jordan Stanchev, has nearly 20 years of experience in the technical communications world.

He is leading the information architecture experts group for the DITA CMS infrastructure at a Fortune 500 company (SAP) for over 5 years now.

Here is what he has to say:

"It can be an extremely hard and tedious job to define a controlled vocabulary and taxonomy terms to use in your company.

I've personally experienced it when in a project I led, I had to prepare and align metadata values to be used across 20 different teams. When I started the discussion, just by asking "well, what do you think, which are the correct metadata values we should use for the new category?" I did not really know what I was heading into! I ended up involved in an endless conversation with 45 different stakeholders, representing 20 different areas. Each of them had his or her own idea of how the metadata value should be defined. Sometimes, even in one and the same team, people were now aligned in what they want the metadata values to be. 

It was an exhausting experiment, in which I was wasting my time in a never-ending discussion. Can you imagine what it felt like? 

This was the reason why I decided that it is time to put a stop on the never-ending-talking. I had to come up with a strategy to solve this problem and unite all of the teams behind one proposal. 

Want to know how I solved the challenge? Well, I simply defined a set of criteria for making the decision and developed the unified version of the values for our taxonomy! 

Every time you have a similar challenge - how to organize various groups around a single idea about the classification of a particular topic or subject, one possible solution is to build a taxonomy. This taxonomy then can serve as the backbone for your web site content organization or controlled vocabulary.

The taxonomy is the basis you can use to make your content metadata rich, so that it can easily be served and consumed by machine algorithms, such as chatbots."

This course is the online version of the workshop "Building Your First Taxonomy For Classification Of Software Documentation".

It allows you to experience what Jordan Stanchev delivers on the technical communication conferences for software documentation around the world:

• TCWORLD - Stuttgart, Germany

  
  The average grade regarding the question how likely would you recommend the lecture was 3,97 out of 5 from the participants of TCWORLD - 2018. 

  
  

  Here is what participants say:

  
  

  "Jordan's excellent course on taxonomies has helped me to consolidate my understanding of what it takes to build intelligent content. I will certainly apply this knowledge to the new documentation project that I'm about to start!"

  
  

  Anne Tarnoruder, Senior Technical Writer at Synopsys Inc, API documentation expert

  
  

• Evolution of Technical Communications (ETC) - Sofia, Bulgaria

  
  The workshop on Building Your First Taxonomy For Classification Of Software Documentation received an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 from the participants of the ETC Conference 2018!

  
  

Enroll now and learn how to build taxonomies and information architecture of your documentation - take the first step to build your career from a technical writer into an information architect!

P.S. Do not forget that this course comes with a 30-day full refund policy - no questions asked!