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Are you going to start a digital project? Whether as a consultant or part of the team in an organization, look at these tips that can be useful.
Starting a digital project can often seem frightening. This usually happens because at the beginning we see everything without form, with knots, there is no order nor is there a clear idea of what to do and where to start.
This post summarizes the teachings of "How to make sense of any chaos" book written by Abby Covert. I share also suggestions based on my previous experiences to help you lose your fear and that little by little you feel more confident
Day by day, whether at your place of work or personal life you face chaos. This can be understood as confusing situations or that present many difficulties. Such are related to the structures, processes and communication in our teams and organizations, or in the way they present, sell and deliver products and services.
Therefore, the information architecture is the way in which we organize all the parts that make up something to make it understandable. It helps us make sense of the world.
Before we start thinking about solutions, we need to collect all the pieces to go little by little putting together the puzzle. How to achieve it?
a) Meet with all the people interested in the project being a success, the so-called stakeholders.
b) Meet with users (current and potential) Learn about their motivations, frustrations, behavior with these UX TOP Techniques to get to know your users.
c) Analyze the strategy, information and the current state.
Once you meet with stakeholders and users, state the purpose of the project. What is the intention behind this project? What do you want to achieve? First the why before the how.
"When we launch into a job without thinking about what we are going to achieve, we can end up with solutions to the wrong problem."
Now, one thing is what we want and another very different is what we can do. Facing reality implies knowing where we want to go and what we have in our control or scope to achieve it. For this reason it is important to define:
On the other hand, we need to really know the users, the channels they use, the context, when they do it, with what type of Internet connection they have, etc. Something important also, is to ask ourselves: are you looking for entertainment or do you need to accomplish a task?
Once the phase of exploring solutions begins, we are going to come up with great ideas that can lead us to another approach that we really need to cover.
a) Define the level at which you are going to work, is it on an object (button), interface, location (position of something), path (steps or process), structure (organization) or system?
Something fundamental to understanding the direction we choose is to delimit the language. By deciding which words or concepts we will use, we can take better control of what we are doing.
b) Explore the ontology (words with a specific meaning under a specific context) and make a controlled vocabulary with the intention of documenting the standards to avoid linguistic inconsistency. Consider then if they are going to be used:
Since we have defined the level at which we will work and the controlled vocabulary, it is time to start creating the taxonomy. The taxonomy is how we are ordering things, the methods to structure and classify the content, in a way that is understandable by our users.
A digital project never ends, it is always alive. Many times the projects fail because they have not had a correct strategy or start by asking all the previous questions.
What you must generate is an open channel of communication with your stakeholders and users to obtain feedback on the language and structure. That is why it is crucial to involve everyone from the beginning.
The areas of opportunity can be detected through tests with users, try to understand the perceptions of people to respond:
We are always available to answer your questions.