[Sigia-l] The category of "Miscellaneous"

[Donna Maurer]

There are no good alternative names. Every alternative name would still 
be a vague description of a vague pile of unrelated stuff. If you have a 
set of 'miscellaneous' then you haven't looked hard enough at the 
content and why users would need the content. People will not 
deliberately look for content in a vague area like 'stuff', 
'miscellaneous', 'links', 'resources' unless they are truly stumped and 
desperately need the information.

It happens a lot with content-centric techniques such as card sorting, 
where a subset of information is selected to look for groupings. There 
will be some things without any overlap that participants can't place. 
This is a by-product of that type of process and is expected.

I look at these and say 'why would someone want to find this 
information' 'what are they doing at the same time' 'what else do they 
need to complete the task'. If you don't know, then perhaps you need to 
find out or perhaps the content is not useful.

donna

Richard Law wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> This is something we have all tried to solve within our content 
> architectures on our projects at some point, so I hope some folks on 
> the list have some interesting ideas for acceptable solutions.
>
> Sometimes it is very difficult to groups links into meaningful 
> categories or buckets. Sometimes document types really defy 
> categorization beyond a general bucket name/label (e.g., General 
> Information, Miscellaneous, etc.). I know it is best to actually 
> create meaningful category names, but sometimes on large enterprise 
> web projects it can be very difficult to get business stakeholders to 
> agree to standardized naming for categorizing content or documents, 
> much less remove dated content from the site.
>
> In absence of a an idea solution, we need to create at a minimum a 
> logical solution that makes sense to customers/users. What good 
> alternative names have you used to group somewhat random content or 
> documents that are not wholly disparate?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Richard



-- 
Donna Maurer
e: donna at maadmob.net
blog: http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/
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