[Sigia-l] Category label and context

[Andrew Hinton]

Victor, I think this might be an example of what you're talking about that
doesn't deal with fruit vs. hardware. It's also a situation in which a
company ended up using a naming scheme similar to what you mention, but
somehow missed all the necessary thinking inbetween.

A client of ours that makes surgical and healthcare supplies (including
sterile gloves) recently acquired another company that also made sterile
gloves. The gloves are still handled by different divisions, and are made of
different stuff, and are used for different purposes (one for healthcare,
the other for scientific/industrial use such as semiconductor cleanrooms).

In their product catalog, these gloves were in several different areas, and
doing a keyword search on just "gloves" would give you several answers, but
you had to get to the actual page of each to get a handle on the context.
Once you got to the scientific/industrial gloves, it was obvious because of
the 'wayfinding' and product descriptions etc. that it wasn't about
healthcare. 

But getting from the front of the catalog to the one type of glove you
needed was more ambiguous and 'context-free' because of the out-of-the-box
interface that came with the massive ecommerce portal they'd bought from a
certain European software juggernaut which shall remain nameless (Es ist
Verboten!). Everything we'd try to make it more contextually relevant to
click through or search their products was eventually ignored or bungled or
turned down entirely by the software vendor.

We had our hands full just making the whole mess usable. It was like getting
blood from a stone trying to make this clunky enterprise software just
communicate workflow appropriately, much less handle a basic thesaurus, or
even a manually created index of some kind. We finally had to give up on the
fancier IA tactics. (Eventually we considered it a great victory that the
client put its main catalog items in alphabetical order, rather than
ordering them by profit margin!!!)

But what they ended up with was a catalog with very strict hierarchy trees
that did indeed have many branches, but the branches and detail pages for
the different kinds of gloves had names like "Latex Exam Gloves - Powdered"
-- the name of the product contains all the relevant terms that make up its
category set (this kind of glove is for medical exams, it is made of latex,
and it is the powdered kind).

What these products were named, finally, came down to a lot of strange
political and financial internal struggles that we had very little say over.
Each noun or adjective in the name carried great baggage. You'd have thought
we were trying to index the Talmud or something.

What they ended up with is now a sort of 'moose' in their organization -- a
product hierarchy that nobody wants to admit isn't working for them online.
Even though each individual item is named appropriately (can't really be
confused with another unique item), the context and relevance are almost
completely missing for anyone -- except their product managers, of course,
to whom this all makes perfect sense.

PS: Hmmm. I just tried their search engine and now I'm getting weird errors
just searching for "glove" -- so there's even more trouble going on with
their incredibly expensive enterprise software than usual. I'll have to give
them a call about this tomorrow. (How do you say "So what else is new?" in
German?)


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andrew.hinton ÷ information.architecture ÷ [ahinton at symetri.com]