Case Study @Google:
Architecting a POI taxonomy to improve the Google Maps experience

The opportunity

Create a POI taxonomy to improve the Google Maps experience.

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The challenge

While working as a Content Strategist on the Geo team at Google, I was on a team tasked with creating a taxonomy to help users find answers to common questions related to dining and nightlife establishments (e.g., does a particular restaurant offer takeout?). These questions were to be surfaced via prompts in the Google Maps apps that leverage visible/accessible user location. Obviously, the question set needed to target the most common question set for the given POI category. We wanted to keep these questions short and to the point, while also making sure they produced enough information to be helpful to users. We didn’t want the copy or the prompt itself to feel pushy or intrusive (or to have users questioning their privacy).

 

The solution 

Zagat was a Google owned company at that point, and had robust data (and editorial knowledge) about the kinds of questions users wanted to know specific categories of dining/nightlife POIs. Working with a team of Google Maps data specialists, we leveraged Zagat’s knowledge (and more specifically category-targeted data) to put a human face on the most commonly asked questions. This helped us correct for data noise that sometimes generated questions that didn’t map up to relevant POI categories (for instance, people weren’t looking for takeout from a fine-dining restaurant). We worked together to build out a taxonomy with hierarchies that mapped to real user needs and journeys.