Practical Classification

"Taxonomy" and "ontology" sound like the substance of academic debate, but it's a subject of much interest to merchandising in the retail industry: when a vendor offers an array of products or services, how can he categorize them in a way that it makes it easy for the user to find? It's possible to take a cue from library science, as many companies have, and enter into the academic practices of categorization and classification. But taken too far, these can be detrimental rather than helpful.

The academic librarian is face with the challenge, given a vast amount of literature on a myriad of topics, of devising a categorization scheme that will result in a clear and understandable method for a person who wants a given book to be able to find it in the collection. The commercial bookseller is faced with exactly the same dilemma, so it would seem reasonable for him to take the same approach.

However, there is a difference between them: the bookseller actually cares that people are able to find the book that they are looking for, and will place it where they are likely to try to find it. The librarian does not: his interest is in having an orderly collection, according to his own concept of how things ought to be, and if people want to find something, they will simply have to learn his system.

Take the example of a single book Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea: it is a fiction story, translated from a foreign language, that expresses philosophical ideas. A bookstore owner would logically choose to have three copies in inventory: one in fiction, another in philosophy, a third in foreign books. A librarian would put it in one and only one place: P3Z, the "general" category of "language and literature." Look for it anywhere else, and you'll be disappointed.

This difference is critical to the quality of service they provide - I could expand on it, but a few questions should make this difference self-evident: When was the last time you walked into a library, at all? Did the staff at the library seem at all happy to see you? Was it easy to find what you were looking for, or did you have to learn the system in order to get what you wanted? Was it in any way a pleasant experience?

And, in case your answers to any of those questions was positive, did you look around to see how many other people were there? Chances are, it was a quiet and vacant place, and that if the library weren't paid for by taxes or the generosity of patrons, it would not be able to survive as a business.

That's not to say that retail is in all cases superior. Consider the layout of the brick-and-mortar department store: if you're looking for a pair of men's dress shoes, you might follow the map to the "men's" department and then the signage to the formal wear. And there, you will be told by a store clerk, in a matter as disdainful as that of any librarian, that you ought to have gone to the shoe department. The retailer can't be bothered to make things available where you would think to look for them, and you have to learn their system of categorization.

The Internet brings the opportunity for retailers to overcome the limitations of the physical store. It's simple and inexpensive to add a link to inventory under mens/formal/shoes as well as shoes/mens/formal (and even formal/shoes/men for the customer who might be inclined to look for them in that manner) - and it should not matter one bit to the retailer that they are listed in multiple places in inventory, as doing so doesn't require having multiple copies of the same item in different physical locations.

However, almost two decades after businesses took to the Internet, they still have yet to get it right. Some sites have broken out of rigid classification systems, but for distressingly many, they remain locked in the librarian mindset of one-and-only-one place for a given product, in a rigid classification system, that may not consider the perspective of the customer at all (many sites classify products according to their org chart).

And technology has done little to solve the problem. Having been through the exercise of evaluating content (mis)management systems a few years ago, I can confidently say that virtually all of them are based on a rigid classification system that insists that any given item can be in only one place. What was once indifference to the customer is now being shrugged off as a system requirement - but the net effect is still the same.

Ultiamtely, to goal of customer service is to serve the customer - and while that seems as self-evident as any other tautology, it's clearly a lesson that retailers have yet to learn, and a critical issue for user experience in which the operations and IT departments are unmotivated to consider a solution.