Lessons Learned: Complex IA

Lessons Learned:
Complex IA
Jason Wiener

About Me
Jason Wiener
● 6x Founder/CEO/CTO
● 22 years experience in agencies and
development & content companies
● Built products that have had:
○ millions of people per day
○ tens of thousands of users per
second
Lessons Learned: Compex IA - Jason Wiener - 13 June 2018

What we’ll discuss tonight
● Quick refresher on UX
● How IA fits into UX
● My approach on UX & IA
● Tackling IA & UX challenges for complex applications
○ "Clean Slate" - Creating a new product from scratch
○ "Meat in the Sandwich" - Auditing existing products for revisions/updates

Quick UX Refresher

What is UX?
● It’s the experience a product creates, for people who use, it in
the real world
● It’s NOT about the inner workings of a product or service
● It’s about how it works on the outside, where a person comes
into contact with it
● When someone asks you what it’s like to use a product or
service, they’re asking about the UX

The elements of holistic UX
Credit: Jesse James Garrett Lessons Learned: Compex IA - Jason Wiener - 13 June 2018

Strategy
● What are you solving and for whom?
● Ask yourself:
○ What does the user need?
○ What’s the context of the solution?

Scope
● What will the product feature to solve the strategic problems?
● The deliverable for this phase is more commonly known as the
FRD (Feature Requirements Document)
○ a.k.a. the “spec”

Structure
● How will the user interact with the scoped features?
● Ask yourself:
○ How does the user move through and make sense of the tasks?
○ Does the flow feel natural?
○ Can users relate to how they’ll solve their problems?

Skeleton
● What are the actual touchpoints the user will use to solve their
problems?
● The deliverable for this phase is more commonly known as
wireframes

Surface
● How will the touchpoints be presented to minimize friction and
optimize the user's experience?
● Ask yourself:
○ How does it look, feel, sound?
○ How will we gain the user's affinity?
● This is the actual UI or design of your product

Where does IA fit?

IA: Smack in the middle
Credit: Jesse James Garrett
Structure
● IA is the way users INTERACT with your product
● It's the function, not the form

IA: Smack in the middle
Credit: Jesse James Garrett
Structure
● IA is the way users INTERACT with your product
● It's the function, not the form
● What does that look like?

IA: What it looks like

My approach

Problem
What are we
solving and
for whom?
Napkin
diagram
FRD 10.20.XX 11.01.XXFlowConcept Wires Comps Prod
Nail the
scope
IA / Boxes &
Arrows
Design
Skeleton Develop,
Launch/Test
& Improve

Use cases

Taking the Strategy & Scope and
solving users’ actual problems
“Clean Slate”
Creating a new product from
scratch

“Clean Slate”
● Creating a new product from scratch it awesome
● It can also be the scariest thing ever in product development
● ...but the world is your oyster.

● FRD/Scope
● Your mind’s eye
○ Put yourself in the persona’s “shoes”
○ Solve their problems
● Pad of paper and a pencil (or pen)
Where do I start?

First Pass

● Do it again…
● Or rather turn it into pixels
● Challenges:
○ How do you deal with multiple personas?
○ What if it’s not “perfect?”
Then what?

Finished IA

Coming into a project already in
production or into development
“Meat in the
Sandwich”
Auditing an existing product to then
analyze/improve/update

“Meat in the Sandwich”
● You have the bread, but need the meat
● Coming into a project in production or late into development
● May or may not have a well documented Strategy or Scope/FRD
● Normally, you're coming into this when a team has been
"transitioned" off or the business stakeholders have a "holy shit"
moment

“Meat in the Sandwich”
● However, the notion is that you have a general sense of:
○ What you're trying to solve and for whom
○ What the product should do functionally
○ What the product currently does
● Your job is to extract the IA, when it may not exist in a usable
fashion because
○ The dev team missed the mark in subsequent phases
○ The IA simply never got done

● Best is TOP down
● Work closely with actual code as well as a working build of the
product (if possible)
● Walk through and inventory they flows noting the discrepancies
with the PRD
● Start with broad stroke functionality
○ Use “black boxes” to block out FPO flow
● Then come back and fill in the FPO blocks
How should I approach this?

Finished Audit IA

● Breakout and detail highly-intricate features
● Wire them back into the larger flow once you detailed the
functionality
● Like a clean slate, pad and pencil (pen) first
● Then render to pixels
Best Practices

1. Empathize with your users &
solve their problem
2. Start broad and narrow in
3. Do it, then do it again
4. Boxes and arrows are your
friend
5. It’s a holistic process
Takeaways

Lessons Learned:
Complex IA
Thanks & Say Hi!
http://jasonwiener.com
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Lessons Learned: Complex IA

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