Introducing the Isovera Book Club!
Isovera has started a weekly book club for our staff to explore ideas in UX, Drupal and Design practices. This club fosters such energized discussion that we usually go over the allotted meeting hour. We plan on posting our insights discussed during book club in our blog weekly.
We’re currently reading How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert, the book outlines a step-by-step process for making sense of messes made of information (and people). It explains the fundamentals of information architecture and how to arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole.
Chapter 6 covers taxonomies and the process of arranging things (in our case a web project). This chapter was an excellent discussion for us because we work with Drupal and one of the most challenging parts of Content Management Systems is getting a client to wrap their head around taxonomies.
Here’s our 4 main takeaways from Chapter 6:
- Deciding how to sort is harder than sorting. When sorting information don’t settle for the first structure of an idea you come up with. Play with the structure thoroughly and from there you can iterate, change and adapt.
- The book does a great job explaining how hyperlinks can create structure in a website. We agree, one of the most powerful components of Drupal is linking content types together through taxonomies.
- Ambiguity costs clarity; exactitude costs flexibility. Oftentimes by keeping a project fairly simple there are some hidden assumptions that happen. We are brought in to unearth project assumptions.
- The way you organize things says a lot about you. Taxonomy is really somewhat subjective. That being said, it is important to identify and represent the different personas that are using your website while creating a taxonomy.
We have one more chapter left in How to Make Sense of Any Mess. Stay tuned for our next Isovera book club selection!
Like what you read? Get blog updates by joining our mailing list.
Read more entries by Allison Collins.
Originally published at /blog/introducing-isovera-book-club.
