Better, faster, and cost effective:
Our goals for your knowledge base, map across your entire corporation
Deep dive into information architecture design process flow
- Human-centered research: Kraft Consulting design process begins by building deep empathy for the user through interviews and observation. By understanding users' mental models, they can create information structures that feel natural and intuitive, minimizing confusion.
- Structuring complex systems: IDEO doesn't just work on websites or software; they redesign entire systems, services, and organizations. In doing so, they must "architect" the flow of information for all stakeholders. For example, in redesigning a civic infrastructure, they would map out how information is shared between the public and government agencies.
- Focusing on findability and discoverability: Good IA is about helping users find what they need and discover what they didn't know they needed. IDEO's rapid prototyping and iterative testing are designed to test and refine a product's information structure and navigation, ensuring optimal user experience.
- Using clear language and storytelling: A crucial component of IA is labeling, which is also a primary part of communication design. As part of their methodology, IDEO focuses on storytelling to define and share a project's purpose, a core function of clear communication.
Philosophical stand in IA
- Focus on the "why": While traditional IA might focus on building sitemaps and wireframes, our process starts by asking "why?" to reframe the problem from the user's perspective.
- The information structure is a result of understanding the user's emotional and practical needs, not a goal in itself.
- Emphasis on tangibility and prototyping: In the IA world, testing might involve card sorting exercises. In our approach, this is expands to "making ideas tangible" through low-fidelity prototypes. This helps our clients and their users interact with and test a conceptual proto-structure in a realistic way, before launching the change order.
- Systemic thinking: Rather than treating IA as a separate phase for a single product, we consider the context of a larger system. For instance, designing based on considering how that content pillar fits into a larger business strategy and the user's workflow.
