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Overview: Online Architecture

Probably the most common reason organisations contact me is to get help with their internal and external information architecture.

I usually find, however, that they first need to find a clear consensus on their communication strategy, content strategy and online strategy. Once that's done, I deliver a document which both you and your developers can understand, including some or all of the following:

  • highly detailed sitemaps: internal intranets, external websites, knowledgebases, and the information flows between them
  • mission statements for principal site chapters, features and content types
  • business requirements for any revised or new features
  • wireframes, allowing both you and your developers to envision how the result will look.

The aim is to deliver something detailed enough for professional developers and designers to give you a concrete quote, but not so technical that noone else understands what they're building.

I can then work with them to deliver it, or assemble a team and manage the site build for you.

Check out some of my firsts and best practices, or just get in touch.

More services: start with Communication strategy.

Relevant resources

We studied the design of 10,000 websites. Here's what we found
www.fastcompany.com
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to investigate ... notion that websites are starting to look the same ... data mining ... scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites... of the Russell 1000, the top U.S. businesses by market capitalization ... Alexa’s 500 most trafficked sites... sites nominated for Webby Awards ... how many pixel-by-pixel edits ... to transform colo…

How to apply the Jobs-to-be-done methodology to web design
blog.juntoo.co

The Jobs-to-be-done methodology helps you focus on the job that the user wants done rather than who and how... First, we take the Persona out of the picture and instead add context. Then we focus on the motivation (i.e, answering the why). It gives us clarity to the whole situation and helps us be more creative in designing a solution.

Two years in, Vox.com reconsiders its 'card stacks'
digiday.com
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they’re not the game-changer he thought they’d be... We have to stop trying to find a single problem. It needs to be solved in a million different ways, every single day.

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Effective Landing Pages
stories.buffer.com
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For the purposes of this post, let’s narrow landing pages down to those connected to content marketing or email marketing campaigns, and meant to generate conversions, bearing in mind those conversions may not necessarily be revenue-generating sales.

UX vs UI vs IA vs IxD : 4 Confusing Digital Design Terms Defined
medium.com

Here’s a quick overview on the four different primary forms of design to help you understand what they mean.

The Feed Is Dying
nymag.com
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The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t... imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper... the curated feed ... can, theoretically, eliminate posting anxiety, find the people you want to talk to (and the people you want to hear from) and make the experience of posting feel …

What happens next with Conversational UIs
medium.com
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Conversational UIs will also force designers to cosy up to writers, or to become more linguistically literate themselves. Information architects will be trendy again, since syntax and labels are totally their turf.

How to Run an Empathy & User Journey Mapping Workshop
medium.com
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Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively,

New York Times: The homepage still plays a prominent role
www.journalism.co.uk
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The news organisation has mostly been focusing on revamping its mobile apps, but the next step is bringing some of the learnings back to the homepage... third in a series looking at how news organisations are now approaching the homepage, after it was pronounced dead by many in 2014... our real challenge everyday is to come in and say 'ok, who…

Why cards are dominating mobile design
thenextweb.com
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2015 is the Year of the Card. Screen-size cards are everywhere, from websites to native apps and are designed to look like their physical counterparts. It’s an easy way for you to shuffle through a series of digital containers with the flick of a thumb...cards are a style that seems just made for apps.

Introducing a new homepage for Quartz
qz.com
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Our first attempt devoted much of the homepage to a continually updated news briefing. We are dispensing with that briefing today to try something else. Homepages, it turns out, aren’t dead so much as reborn.

What you know about information architecture might not be true
medium.com
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information architecture has become ripe with myths... I want to take a few moments to dispel some of them.... People convince themselves that information architecture is about organising content in a logical way. It is not... people aren’t logical.... users need to be able to reach content in three clicks.... there is no evidence to support…

The Future of the Internet Is Flow
www.wsj.com
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Lifestream unified our digital life: Each new document, email, bookmark or video became a bead threaded onto a single wire in the Cloud, in order of arrival...Whenever you add a bead to the lifestream, you specify who may see it... Your future home page is a bouquet of your favorite streams ... News streams blended with shopping streams, blogs,…

Replacing The User Story With The Job Story
medium.com
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Job Stories are great because it makes you think about motivation and context and de-emphasizes adding any particular implementation. Often, because people are so focused on the who and how, they totally miss the why. When you start to understand the why, your mind is then open to think of creative and original ways to solve the problem. - Repl…

Will semantic cards will replace the URL as the web’s sharing mechanism?
medium.com
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Cards are bite-sized, self-contained, interactive units of graphical real estate presented within digital apps... cards are mostly used within apps to present information and provide interactive functions ... Things get a lot more fun, however, once cards can be shared between different apps.... The Guardian provides cards on Google Now ... [wh…

Editing Applying advanced language technologies to EU democracy
medium.com

"If you want to know where web design is heading, just look at where architecture has already gone." - The Future of Web Design is Hidden in the History of Architecture — Medium

The Future of Web Design is Hidden in the History of Architecture — Medium
medium.com
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"If you want to know where web design is heading, just look at where architecture has already gone." - The Future of Web Design is Hidden in the History of Architecture — Medium

How Fold Breaks Stories into Contextual Pieces
www.pbs.org
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"Fold is a platform for telling stories. It makes it simple to add multimedia background information or create context... the main story reads as all stories do, straight down vertically. But contextual information is placed to the side of the main story, on a horizontal line. That information can be video, photos, or links to other sites..."…

5 Building Blocks of Visual Hierarchy in Web Design
thenextweb.com
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To be rolled out next time someone wants to "skip the analyses and wireframes - just give us the mockups": "An interface's visual hierarchy relies on the same principles of aesthetics used by the Renaissance masters, but on top of that (or rather beneath it) there's the subtext of secondary goals - promoting specific content, encouraging user…

What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks
alistapart.com
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" Top tasks are the small set of tasks ... that matter most to your customers. Make these tasks work well, and you’ll be on the right track. Get them wrong, and chances are you’ll lose the customer. Top Tasks Management is a model that says: “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).” Tiny ta…

Transforming Web Tags into Rich Customer Data
customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.be
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"an engine to generate custom sets of tags for each Web site visitor.... the next step is to assemble the tag data into detailed individual profiles for personalization, testing, attribution, and other purposes... These features go beyond Web page tags to capture data from mobile apps, from ad pixels served on external Web sites, and from other s…

64 Ways To Think About a News Homepage ... or any homepage
medium.com
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"By news homepage, I mean any way for a user to first encounter content. A push notification could very well be the new news homepage. ... An article or a newsletter ... Overcast or Soundcloud or iTunes may be your homepage.... Homepage, to me, is simply a shorthand version for any of these things. " Neat overview. Just remember, however you desi…

Why Cards Are the Future of the Web
medium.com
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"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

Menus vs. Search: Answered(?)
www.enterprisestrategies.com

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

Create Highly Converting Navigation Menus
rich-page.com
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"It can actually have a tremendous impact on visitors perception of your website, whether they can easily find what they are looking for, and ultimately whether they purchase what you are selling." Pretty sell-focused, but there's no better force to refine an information architecture than assigning a value to each click ... and each bounce! - Ho…

Intranet redesign, Phase 2: information architecture & content audit
intranetdiary.co.uk
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Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…

Politico, HBR, Guardian redesigns: who wins?
digiday.com
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"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

Guardian's new liveblog format
www.niemanlab.org

"The Guardian has a new setup for its liveblogs that aims to fix some of their eternal problems — chief among them that they’re great for in-the-moment following along, but cryptic and unnavigable after the fact" - The Guardian has a new format for liveblogs to make them more readable » Nieman Journalism Lab

NYT Launches “Watching” Homepage Feature
investors.nytco.com

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

The homepage's dead, but Quartz just built one
qz.com
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Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

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