What are Categories? | Help Center

Setting your Categories up well sets you up to create great content fast!

Asset Libraries are like warehouses. They need an organisational strategy from the start, otherwise Assets will become increasingly difficult to find as the warehouse fills. If that happens, you’ll end up with frustrated users who can’t find or access the things they’re looking for.

Getting your strategy right from the beginning.

Setting things up properly from the outset just requires a little planning.

One of the first things you can do is conduct an audit to work out exactly what Assets you have. Taking inventory of your Assets will give you a good overview of what you have, where it is currently stored, and if it is still relevant to the team/company.

Next up, think about your Users and how they will be accessing all these Assets. If you understand their needs and work out the logic with clarity, you’ll be able to streamline the categorisation of Assets to suit.

Creating Categories.

Now you know what your Assets are and how people need to access them, you can work out the family of Categories that applies best to your Team.

Remember, Categories will be used to sort Assets, so your Categories should reflect how your Users search for Assets.

There are countless ways to categorise your Assets. It can be by model, season, year, location... the list goes on. It all depends on what your Team does and how your Users need to access the Assets. Every Team is different, so there’s no right and wrong here and it’s important to remember that you can fine-tune your Categories over time to suit the way your Assets evolve.

Also bear in mind that there are logical ‘nestings’ of Categories.

For instance, if you happen to be in the clothing industry, you might have a number of Categories (or what are sometimes called ‘Parent’ Categories) such as Mens, Womens, Kids. And then within these Categories, you might have a range of sub-categories (or what are sometimes called ‘Child’ Categories) like tops, pants, jackets, footwear.

So if you’re searching for women's pants, you can select the ‘Womens' and ‘Pants’ categories and the Asset Library will present you with all those Assets that fall within this Category search. If you change your mind and want to add Footwear, the Asset Library instantly adds all the Women’s Footwear Assets to your search.

Naming Categories.

Category names don't seem that important, but it pays to do it properly.

A few tips:

Use clear labels - ambiguous terms make things hard.
Avoid jargon - Use terms that all Users will also understand.
Keep them short and simple - people want to be able to navigate fast.

Once you’ve named your Categories, they should naturally fall into a neat structure with Categories and then sub-categories nested underneath.

Additional tips:

Avoid too many top-level Categories. You don’t want decision paralysis for Users.
When Users drop down into the sub-categories, make sure it’s limited to an amount that’s useful, but not overwhelming.
Aim to get Users to most Assets by three clicks, maximum four.

The difference between Tags and Categories.

Tags and Categories go hand in hand to help sort, filter, and find Assets.

If Categories are the broad ‘family’ groupings that logically sort your Assets, Tags are the detail of each Asset, pinpointing very specific attributes.

For instance, a Tag might be the colour of a garment, the subject matter of a video, the date an image was taken. Tags are vital elements in your organisation of Assets to help you find the right Asset faster.