TAXONOMY & SITE NAVIGATION

Improving user experience through core taxonomy and site navigation upgrade

COLLABORATION AND REIMAGINATION

Updating taxonomy framework, internal and external site experiences to improve navigation and user experience

The opportunity.

In reviewing digital advertising opportunities around editorial coverage, we wanted to simplify the core areas of coverage for sponsorship. This opened up a conversation about our information architecture, what our newsrooms covered and site navigability. The opportunity to reimagine and simplify the editorial taxonomy around coverage along with opening a new business journal market provided opportunity to repaint our approach.

Step 1: A new taxonomy framework

With core partners in editorial, we constructed a new framework that created logic for determining our core editorial coverage areas universally across markets, enabled market flexibility and dynamic topics, as well as structural and meta tags that allowed for great information to be captured around created content for site experience and advertising products.

Step 2: An epic of development

With buy in, this project required multiple layers of development work. We started at the bottom creating an AI-powered auto-tagging tool that evaluated content and tagged, giving us richer information about content than previously and less reliant on time of reporters.

This work bled into digital experience redesign of sections and how we treat more premium areas of content, then into information architecture and navigability of content.

Step 3: An opportunity to move fast

With the launch of a new market, we had the opportunity to completely reshape our site navigation, starting from scratch and using our new taxonomy framework as the jumping off point. We did information architecture exercises to bridge what we have to what’s new and mood boarded inspiration for a new navigation. This was built and launched in our new market, Fort Worth.