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.
The [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”
And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.