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.
Design thinking sells a fantasy. It sells you the fantasy that with some guidelines, templates, and sticky notes, you can do what IDEO does just like how they do it.
…if it were true that design thinking lets you do what the best designers do, IDEO could put themselves out of business. If they were really selling you the absolute guide on how they solve problems, innovate, and design, you wouldn’t need IDEO. Their idea to save their business from a slump hypothetically cannibalizes their business…Unless they knew that it wouldn’t.