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.
Can we do anything to increase creativity? There are training courses, and books, as well as “brainstorming sessions” which are supposed to do this. Taking the brainstorming sessions first, while they were very fashionable at one time, they have generally been found to be not much good when formally done, when a brainstorming session is carefully scheduled. But we all have had the experience of “tossing an idea around” with a friend, or a few friends (but not a large group, generally), from which insight, creativity, or whatever you care to call it, arises and we make progress.