Analytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups.
Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach:
Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content.
Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction.
Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases.
Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally.
Could that delicate and complex instrument that lies in the human breast ever really produce a reading that was absolutely clear and truthful, like a clock’s hands pointing to numbers on its dial?
I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.
If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me.