Designing enterprise system information architecture using task data

Abstract

Much of today’s information architecture for enterprise tools is organized in a complex and feature oriented way–frustrating the users and requiring tons of learning to be efficient. We introduced a task taxonomy research project that studied a few hundred database users to understand their responsibilities, roles, and tasks. We created a task taxonomy model filled with large quantitative data on tasks. We found task hierarchy emerged from the model and it had a strong relationship with user roles–implying role-based workspace design principles. With the task hierarchy data, the degree of relevance of task hierarchy could be estimated and applied for enterprise information architecture designs.