Creating an End-User Friendly Taxonomy in ServiceNow

Building a successful Taxonomy for Service Catalog and Knowledge Management 

Creating an end-user-friendly taxonomy for use in ServiceNow Catalog and/or Knowledge Management is often a struggle for organizations. Many times, this task becomes an exercise where the implementation team tries to guess what will resonate with end-users, but this strategy rarely captures the actual voice of the people using the app for their jobs.

Within an organization, different departments may have their own way of speaking and communicating about their jobs.

For example, an IT department will typically have its own set of jargon related to requesting or accessing a piece of information that only an employee working that department may understand. These might be the same tasks being performed within another part of the company, just called by a different name. Needless to say, if someone from the IT department tried to use that department’s acronyms with someone in HR, for example, there would understandably be some confusion. 

This is why having any singular group working to build a taxonomy that the whole organization will be using is difficult. Engaging employees in this stage of product development will yield better engagement and buy-in from all parties.

Tools are available to help facilitate this process further, making sure that the ServiceNow suite works for all employees.

Traditional UX techniques like card sorting activities can help to better integrate multiple user's input on how to design the taxonomy structure of a catalog. Click To Tweet

Surveys, designed to guide end users through some sample taxonomies to see how well they perform, also allow implementers to put much higher quality taxonomy designs in place from the start.

Using these techniques, we can help significantly cut down on the time needed in on-site workshops and meetings to determine taxonomy structure.

This will also cut down significantly on the amount of time spent tailoring and tweaking the program to fit user needs after going live.

To provide a complete, high quality design that incorporates real user feedback, rather than guessing at what might work, a little bit of work at the outset and a partner like Cask will ensure that we all speak the same language.