Product and interface
Information architecture
How the content and functions of a product are named, grouped and nested — the structure a person navigates before they read anything.
Also called IA
Information architecture decides whether someone can find a thing without searching, and it is fixed early and expensively. It is also the layer search engines read: the URL hierarchy, the internal links and the labels are simultaneously a navigation system and a description of what the site is about.
Good structure is discovered rather than invented, usually by watching how the people who already do the job group things. The vocabulary of the business is often wrong for the customer — a company organises by department, customers arrive by problem.
Sites structured around internal divisions force the visitor to know how the company is organised before they can find anything. Structure by the question the visitor arrived with, and let the internal structure live in the “about” section where it belongs.
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- Your product has a meaning. You are too close to say it
- The name is not the work. The invariant is the work, and the name is what it compresses to.
- UX, UI and user flows
- Model states, don’t multiply screens.
- Platform and transactional architecture
- The domain model is the product. Everything above it is an interface to it.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.