A thoughtful taxonomy ensures anyone performing thorough analysis on their customer feedback is categorizing and analyzing data in the same way, leading to more reliable insights and a knowledge base you can trust. In this lesson, we’ll walk you through the practical steps to create a robust taxonomy with your team, starting with determing whether implementing a taxonomy is right for you and your team.

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Should we invest in creating a tagging taxonomy?

When it comes to analyzing qualitative feedback, the process of tagging your data requires careful thought and can sometimes feel like a detailed, time-consuming task. This often leads to a crucial question: Is the effort of tagging really worth it? The answer, as with many aspects of research methodology, is: it depends. The value you get from tagging hinges on four key factors: your dataset, your current process, the tags you choose, and the amount of time you’re willing in invest in managing these Think of it this way: not all tags are created equal. A well-thought-out tagging strategy can be the key to unlocking deep insights, identifying underlying tensions in your data, and discovering rich, meaningful patterns. On the other hand, a poorly planned approach to tagging will consume the same amount of time and effort but will likely lead to less valuable takeaways and perspectives. The entire collection of tags you decide to use is what we call your tag taxonomy or, more simply, your tagging framework. This framework is the backbone of your analysis, and a strong one will make all the difference in the insights you uncover.

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Schedule a workshop

If you’ve decided to implement a taxonomy for your team to follow, get it right from the start and host a session with your stakeholders who will be doing research. For this session, bring in your core team to get a sense of what tags are important to:
  1. Each stakeholder
  2. Each research method will be conducted in the workspace
Getting this input early will help ensure processes can be standardized across the board and improve how research is organized in the workspace.

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Design guiding questions

In this workshop, brainstorm key areas important to your organization and ask guiding questions to prompt discussion on what you and your team wish to track in Dovetail. Align tags to the strategy of your business and decisions being made including:
  • What are your product areas?
  • What are your main research methods?
    • These may be qualitative interviews, usability testing, survey analysis, desk research or more!
  • Who are your customer segments/personas?
  • How do you classify pain points or customer feedback?
  • How will tags be consumed and by who?
    • eg: “Customer love” tag or “Golden nuggets” tag could be surfaced in feeds. Each feed can be created and curated to auto-display content as it is produced by those in the workspace, including content under a certain tag. They’re a great starting point for stakeholders to self-serve research findings at a high level without needing to jump into projects.
For your workshop, do this in Dovetail. Open a new project and start building tag boards straight away. These boards can be kept as local, project tags or elevated to global, workspace tags for your team to use.

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Define and map to Dovetail

When building out your taxonomy and defining your tags, consider the following guidance.

Keep them short

  • Keeping tags short and sweet; a few words rather than a long sentence.

Add tag descriptions

  • These can contain anything you wish to communicate about the tag that will help guide others and make it easy for the team to understand what the tag is referring to and where they may apply it.

Explore templates

  • For inspiration on common tag boards, look at Dovetail templates. You can bring these into your workspace and tailor these to define tags important to your organization.
Once they have been created, determine whether the board and tags within may be most useful at a local project or global workspace level.
  • Research is often conducted in projects and Dovetail takes a project-centric approach to organizing data. Project tags are useful for when teams prefer to maintain tag sets that are highly contextual to the project they’re working on, while avoiding the chaos of making everything ‘global’.
  • Workspace tags enable stakeholders in your organization to contribute to a shared knowledge base and language and help leaders standardize processes across a single workspace.
To streamline research efforts, connect workspace tags to project templates so they’re automatically available for stakeholders to use when starting a new project.

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Revisit and review

Ensure there is someone governing and managing the tags you have in the workspace on a regular cadence. For smaller teams, this could be every 6 months. For larger teams, this could be once a quarter. When reviewing your tag boards, we suggest identifying three core tag types.

Tags with a high highlight count

  • These could be too broad in nature so consider getting more granular. eg: a single “Pain point” tag could be updated to a “Pain point” tag group or board with more specific tags that define pain points.

Tags with low highlight count

  • These could be too granular or be similar to other tags that exist in the workspace. You could consider locating similar or duplicate tags and merging these together.

Project tags or tag boards with high usage

  • This may indicate that tags contained within the board resonate across different projects. These could be promoted from project to workspace tags that connect related data and track similar themes.