The importance of categories
Everyday, like many people I know, I start out by creating my daily strike list. My list (which I manage in Trello) is always broken into a pretty simple format: Work, Personal, Meetings, Active Tasks, and Completed Tasks. In my mind it is natural to create these separations - in fact, it is most likely evolutionary in every human person to do so in their own way. For humans, both concrete objects and abstract ideas are recognized, differentiated, and understood through categorization.
Our brains are hardwired to put ideas into boxes. Our conscious is not capable of treating every object as unique; otherwise, we would experience too great a cognitive load to be able to process the world around us. Therefore, our brains develop ” concepts,” or mental representations of categories of objects. Categorization is fundamental in language, prediction, inference, decision making, and all kinds of environmental interaction. Therefore, we can conclude that people naturally create categories.
Additionally, people will impose categories when confronted with large amounts of information. Users instinctually create categories to make sense of the world around them, especially when overwhelmed by information. Keeping that in mind - if you don’t organize your material into understandable, structured categories, the audience will try to do it for themselves.
In the end it isn’t the “who” that matters in organization, but the “how”. If you can set the framework, mindset, and steps for a user, you will have better control on the ultimate outcome. Therefore, when planning your project roadmap, keep in mind the categorization - making sure it is organized, intentional, and structurally sound.
Your users crave structure and organization. Support their needs and your outcomes by taking the time to implement categorization into your future material and projects.
