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.
My point here is that in a design system every paper cut is felt. Every collapse leads to another, every new modal or unnecessary checkbox component hinders the collective refactoring that’s required to make a codebase consistent and easy to understand. When it comes to hyperobjects and design systems everything matters (although, frustratingly, it is impossible to measure success) and the smallest problem is just a signal in the dark—a premonition of a monster; organizational dysfunction writ large.