Open About PebbleRoad

About PebbleRoad

PebbleRoad is a Singapore-based innovation and design consultancy. We envision a world where digital business transformation is not just a buzzword but a catalyst for meaningful, sustainable growth. We aim to deliver this outcome by empowering our clients with the experience and expertise to achieve strategic clarity, build innovative digital products, and grow capabilities.

Knowledge about organising digital information is a critical skill set. We often share the information in this book with our clients and are amazed to see them connect the dots and find opportunities in their work. We hope this book helps you find similar inspiration. Happy reading!

Open Why organise information for others?

Why organise information?

Digital publishing and social networks have accelerated the amount of information we’re exposed to today. We’re publishing more information and are more connected than at any other time in history.

The last such burst of information occurred after Gutenberg mechanised bookmaking around 1440. We then had libraries, librarians, and classification systems to access and manage the growing collections.

The same happens in today’s digital world—the scales have just changed.

Websites, intranets, shared folders, and collaboration spaces = the new libraries

Web team, intranet team and, more commonly, regular staff (employees) = the new librarians

Lists, categories, trees, facets, taxonomies—the stuff you’ll learn in this book = the classification systems

In 1876, the American librarian Charles Ammi Cutter laid out three rules for a library:

1. To enable a person to find a book
2. To sh

Open Understanding your users

Understanding your users

How you organise information depends on whom you’re organising for. For example, you might organise the same information one way for doctors but another way for patients.

There are many ways to understand the target users. You can observe them, talk to them, or learn about them. If the target users are people in your company, you’ll be surprised at how much you already know about them.

At the very least, you should be looking for:

• The job they are trying to get done
• The information they need to get the job done
• How they look for this information—the information-seeking behaviour

Below is an oversimplified description of intent, part of a persona in design literature.

_Joan is an event planner at ABee. Her immediate job is to plan the upcoming East Asia Forum. She hopes to use last year’s event report as a reference. She will look for it on the company’s intranet. She sets off with the keyw

Open Lists

Lists

Lists are a simple and elegant way of organising low-volume information. We’ve all made lists at some point. We create shopping lists, to-do lists, checklists, and reminder lists without even realizing that we’re using one of the most natural and efficient information organization devices available.

Lists are useful because they group related information, which can be things, concepts or ideas.

A list of things to buy on the next visit to the grocery store:

• Bread
• Eggs
• Cheese
• Tomatoes
• Carrots
• Milk
• Batteries

A list of webpages on planning an official overseas trip:

• Research and planning
• Budget
• Accommodation
• Air transport
• Land transport
• Local contacts
• Emergency numbers
• FAQs

Although lists are easy and effective when you’re the one using it, things can be a little different when you make lists for others. This is because others don’t have the same context and understanding you us

Open Trees

Trees

The previous chapter was all about single categories. But categories can be nested as well—categories under categories. And this nesting can go deep. Just look at your PC’s file manager for examples of deeply nested categories.

These nested categories are called trees. We can also refer to them as hierarchies, but hierarchies imply an inheritance property. In the example below, a Square inherits the qualities of the broader terms. A Square is-a Quadrilateral, is-a Polygon and is-a Shape.

• -> Shape
• --> Polygon
• ---> Quadrilateral
• ----> Square

In the example below, however, Privates do not inherit the qualities of the higher chain of command. A Private is not a Sergeant, for example.

This arrangement is called a tree. Trees offer a more lenient approach to nested categories.

• -> Generals
• --> Colonels
• ---> Captains
• ----> Lieutenants
• ------> Sergeants
• -------> Privates

Shown below is an

Open Facets

Facets

A facet is a particular view of information. Information can have many facets.

Let’s get back to our example on trip reports. You’ve already picked out many facets or views to the reports. These are:

• By year
• By country
• By purpose

Note that facets have values as shown:

By year

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022

By country

• Singapore
• United States
• Malaysia

By purpose

• Academic conference
• Research collaboration
• Joint-exercise

Every trip report can now be assigned values from the list above.

Document	Year	Country	Purpose
x1.doc	2024	Malaysia	Academic conference
x2.doc	2022	United States	Research collaboration

Here are a couple of points to note about the table:

• It is very different from a folder structure—it is one big table
• Unlike the folder structure, this tab

Open Metadata

Metadata

To understand metadata, ask yourself this question the next time you go shopping: can I get all the information I need from this product I’m holding to make a well-informed purchase decision?

If you have all the information you need, then you most probably got it from the product's label. The label shows the brand, material, price, and any applicable discounts. The information on the label is metadata.

It is the same with digital information. If you look at a document and get the Title, Author, Description, and Date it was published, you’re looking at the document’s metadata.

There are two things you need to know about metadata:

• Metadata is not usually part of the document body (just like labels are not part of the food)
• Metadata contains rich information that identifies the document (e.g. Title, Author, Publish Date etc.)

Here’s a question: What happens if 10 documents have an Author m

Open Taxonomy

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a structured way of organising information. It comes in different shapes and sizes. And it is sometimes hierarchical.

Yes, you read that right—taxonomy is not always hierarchical.

The different ways of organising information you’ve seen in this book—lists, categories, trees, facets—are shapes a taxonomy can take.

Patrick Lambe has written an illustrative post titled "What shape is a taxonomy?"where he describes why treating a taxonomy as only hierarchical may be misleading.

If a taxonomy is a structured way of organising information and can take many shapes, then we’re looking at a system of taxonomies all working together in a company. This is usually called a corporate taxonomy.

So, a corporate taxonomy is not one gigantic structure for organising all corporate information. It is a system of multiple taxonomies.

Open Testing

Testing

Organising information for others is a big responsibility. Your design can influence other people’s productivity and understanding when they visit your page, website or intranet.

The key to becoming good at organising information is to be reflective and challenge your decisions. Do I have the correct organising principle in place? Have I selected the proper shape of the taxonomy? Is it usable? What’s stopping the information from being found? You can get answers to these questions by constantly testing your ideas and designs with target users.

Two techniques are often used to run such tests: card sorting and usability testing.

Card sorting

Card sorting is a simple exercise for creating categories or testing the categories' effectiveness.

Since trees and facets also use categories, card sorting also helps in testing trees and facets.

The technique goes something like this:

• Gather all the terms you want to

Open Conclusion

Conclusion

This book covered much ground, from lists to trees and metadata to taxonomy. Although we took an introductory approach to these subjects, it gives you the confidence to converse with your team and colleagues about the importance of organising information for others. These conversations, in turn, can help make our pages, websites, and intranets more effective and the people using them happier!

So, go ahead and spread the message and let the conversations begin!

Happy organising!

Open Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

This book was published as a PDF e-book in 2012. We thought it was done and dusted. However, with the rise of LLMs and GenAI, we educate many people on these concepts. We decided to update the content to reflect where it can be used with AI and publish it as an online book.

We want to thank Patrick Lambe, Martin White and James Robertson for their valuable inputs.