Making information architecture and sensemaking skills accessible to everyone.
People
Abby Covert
Methods
Card SortingAsking participants to group and label content items to reveal mental models. Open, closed or hybrid sorts inform information architecture, navigation labels and content groupings before detailed UI design.
Content StrategyContent strategy sets the direction for content and the system needed to keep it useful. Identify audience needs and organisational goals, decide what content belongs at each point in the user journey, and plan how it will be structured and found. Define responsibilities, publishing workflows, maintenance rules and measures of quality. Use it when content spans teams, channels or stages of a service, especially where ownership is unclear or material becomes inconsistent. Review existing content and the processes supporting it as needs change.
Journey MappingJourney mapping brings research about people’s experiences into a shared visual account of stages, actions, thoughts and feelings. It is useful when a service spans multiple steps, teams, places or touchpoints and you need to see where those parts fail to connect. Collect accounts from several users before mapping. Arrange their experiences over time, identify common stages and highlight problems and dependencies. Work with the team so the map informs decisions. Preserve meaningful differences between journeys rather than forcing every participant into a single path; revise the map as further research changes your understanding.