Imagine you were handed masses of information without any physical form, stored in a variety of ways, intended for a heterogeneous set of users in several possible fluid contexts. What would you want to know in order to organize and create access to this information in a useful and usable manner? Asked another way, what do you need to know to connect people to this content? Taken at face value, the answer is deceptively simple—you need to understand the content, the users, and the many different contexts in which they function.

Users, content, and context are the three basic pieces you need to understand separately and together in order to create and maintain a useful and usable information system. Each piece provides a specific glimpse into the issues involved, but the real power comes from the combination of the three. Argus Associates, Inc. used a basic Venn diagram to illustrate this concept (see Figure 1).

The intersection of these three pieces represents the interplay between users, content, and context. It is this interplay that needs to be identified, captured, and made part of the information system. In the resulting design, this interplay is expressed in various parts of the system, such as selection of content for the system; connections between the various storage mediums holding the content; design of original metadata; mapping of existing metadata; structure of the browse and search retrieval systems; design of the user interface; and, my favorite part, the creation, integration, and use of taxonomies.
 

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