Leaders in Information Strategy
Factor is an information architecture and human experience consultancy. Factor will create an information strategy for your organization, using an evidence-driven approach.
Optimize Costs
Factor helps organizations cut costs by identifying information needs. We provide governance guidelines for how to meet those information needs, and streamline operations in a coordinated way.
With Factor’s help, organizations can:
- Cut server costs
- Reduce licensing costs
- Increase employee/ admin efficiency
- Invest in projects and people that move the organization forward
Increase Revenue
Factor increases revenue at organizations with improved user experiences, increased findability, and better information structures, by engaging in work with taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs.
With Factor’s help, organizations can:
- Increase sales
- Improve onboarding of new users
- Evolve without disrupting existing customers and stakeholders
- Build platforms powered by AI
Common Issues We Address
Problems
Without a high-level information strategy, organizations often struggle with their highly specific taxonomies and controlled vocabularies.
In our work, we frequently encounter:
- Ad hoc database schemas
- Findability issues: customers can’t find products; employees can’t find information
- Analytics are nearly impossible
- Operational inefficiency
- High administrative costs
- Inability to keep pace in a rapidly changing digital landscape
Solutions
Factor will create an information strategy that allows your organization to align around one voice and a single vocabulary by:
- Developing an information strategy that’s scalable and adaptable to change
- Prioritizing cost-saving and revenue-driving activities through a realistic roadmap
- Optimizing content creation and publishing, focusing only on the relevant content that your consumers value
- Streamlining data acquisition to enable actionable insights from analytics
- Realizing the value of your organization’s data and information
Project Services
Foundational Assessment
The quality and effectiveness of an information model depend on an in-depth understanding of the information supply chain. Areas of focus in our assessment include analytics, competitors, taxonomy/metadata, SEO, technical systems, user experience, and governance workflows.
User Research
An understanding of user mental models and information-seeking behavior is a critical input for information modeling.
Factor’s user research capability combines the best quantitative and qualitative approaches to develop a deep, unaided understanding of user information behavior, motives, needs and goals.
Information Architecture & Modeling
Factor creates a number of models that define different aspects of the information architecture. These models are “blueprints” that describe scope and structure of the navigation, taxonomies, metadata, or content.
Taxonomy Building
Factor will build or update taxonomies, navigation, and navigation-related facets based on the IA Models and the agreed-upon scope. Scope will include the number of taxonomies, amount of testing, and number of sources to be used.
Governance Planning & Training
Governance and maintenance of taxonomies and metadata are essential for data quality and long-term project success.
Implementation Support
Factor will participate in the implementation process in either an advisory role or as a full participant. This is generally scoped as a set of hours that Factor will be available to answer questions, provide additional research, or participate in meetings.
Workshops
Taxonomy Workshop
Factor can provide full or half-day instructional workshops at your organization, covering the basics of information architecture as it applies in an enterprise environment. Topics covered include:
- Intro to key concepts in taxonomy and ontology
- Card sorting activity
- Intro to taxonomy design
- Intro to taxonomy and metadata governance
- Best practices that anyone can use in their day-to-day work