CEPA
A foreign-policy institute with years of articles, reports, events and expert profiles, none of it categorised in a way you could search. The job was to audit what was there, work out why tagging kept failing, build a taxonomy across all of it, then design the search on top.
Three years retained and still running. Transatlantic institute; NATO, Ukraine and EU tech policy.
Year
2023-26
Scope
Taxonomy across four content types, faceted search
(_Overview)
349 results, no way to tell them apart
One keyword returned 349 results with people, events, articles and PDFs run together in a single list. Underneath that, four kinds of content had never shared a tagging system, and staff were not tagging consistently because tagging was tedious, which makes it a design problem rather than a staffing one. Which filters open first came from what the archive actually holds and what people already type into search. The alternative is to mirror how the institute is organised internally, which makes sense to everyone who works there and to nobody else. Most readers arrive on a link and have never seen the programme names. Load times fell 70%, the work published, and the retained relationship is still running. Bounce fell in the reports section on the client analytics; no figure was shared.
