Why your business metrics depend on good information architecture

Noz Urbina: And it’s great to have you. So Dan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and Curious Squid. How did you, what is the road that took you to this podcast episode today?

Dan Brown: What a great way of asking that question. I got started in website design in mid nineties. Pretty soon after I graduated from college and back then we were all sort of jacks of all trade. And I dabbled in design, I dabbled in development and programming and things like that.

And then when I moved to the Washington DC area and I got a job at a consulting company, I really wanted to focus my career. And I ended up discovering and realizing that my focus was information architecture. And I was at various kind of government contractors and consulting firms for about 10 years.

And then in 2006, I started a firm called Eight Shapes with my business partner Nathan Curtis. And we ran Eight Shapes for 18 years. And just last year we sunsetted Eight Shapes and I wanted to keep doing what we were doing. So I created a new entity called Curious Squid to kinda keep providing the kind of consulting that I was doing.

Eight Shapes was founded to be sort of, we had framed it in our minds as the adaptive path of the East coast or of the Washington DC area. Adaptive path was a well-known user experience consulting firm in San Francisco. And we felt there was an opportunity in the DC area to have something similar. We did, you know, end-to-end user experience design, user experience consulting.

Through about 2015 we were bringing kind of large design teams to projects and kind of doing full scale design work. The market really changed in 2015. We got smaller, we became more focused on consulting. Nathan went off and really focused on design system consulting, and I continued to do the more general UX stuff.

When it came time to close, I really saw this as well. First, I was terrified of leaving Eight Shapes behind because I had been doing it for so long. Nathan and I had really gotten to a good place. We left on amicable terms. We’re still friends. But it was time to say goodbye to Eight Shapes.

And then the second thing that after my fear was making a decision to try and focus more exclusively on information architecture. My strength, but also the thing that I really, really love doing. And I’ve been very fortunate over the last year and a half since starting Curious Squid to really be able to just do IA related projects.

IA tends to be very, tends to be sort of pigeonholed as a content related field, but really IA can be seen in a more strategic, more systems thinking kind of way, and really applies to lots of different ways people interact with information. And so my practice now really all has IA kind of flowing through it, but I’ve engaged with clients in lots of different ways.

So, and I posted something on LinkedIn and someone said, “Hey, you should talk to Noz.” And then you and I talked and that’s the road that led me to this podcast right now.

Noz Urbina: Well, I can see from your description why someone would point you in my direction. I think we have a lot of commonalities in our background. I’m very interested when you say that IA is pigeonholed to something content related, but is bigger. This is the Omnichannel podcast and so we are very much looking at experiences, content design, governance systems in that holistic lens. So what do you think that IA is beyond content? ‘Cause a lot of people will either not know what it means or think it means building website navigation.

Dan Brown: Right. I mean, you said exactly what I was about to say, which is when I say information architecture, you know, 99 out of a hundred people say, “you mean website navigation?” And I do, but that’s a part of it, right? There’s a lot more to it. Even within a content ecosystem. We need, and by ecosystem I mean sort of any space in which people engage with information right in some way.

We need ways of connecting that information together to make it easier for people to jump from piece of information to piece of information, from content to content. However, that is, you know, a way of organizing a library or, you know, a way of organizing a record store, right? And that’s just like, we have known content and we want to create mechanisms to allow people to engage with the information in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to their work.

But at the end of the day, we’re designing a system about that content in some products. In some spaces we have, let’s call it a higher level of abstraction, but it is still a system that needs designing a set of categories of the way things information objects interact with each other, the way people want to access the information in that object, the way people want to manipulate that information.

All of those are what in my mind, structural concerns? So when people ask me for a definition of information architecture, I describe it as the practice of designing structures, right? So creating these frameworks that enable people to interact with information regardless of where or how that information exists.

Noz Urbina: So let me, and if you want to give a different example, please do, but I’m gonna use my new favorite example. So I’ve got a taco truck business. Got my fleet of taco trucks.

Dan Brown: Do you really?

Noz Urbina: No, but I would think it’d be so cool if I did but I think it’s a nice example.

Dan Brown: It’s a great example.

Noz Urbina: There’s an industry kind of cliche, which is teaching people how to structure content using recipes as an example.

Dan Brown: Oh yeah. Classic.

Noz Urbina: I love that one. Everybody eats, and I think that everybody, you’re teaching something that’s esoteric and foreign borderline, bizarre to people who need to understand it, but just don’t have a mental model to put their hands on. Meeting them halfway with something they do know I think is useful.

Dan Brown: Can I build on your example of recipes before we get to the taco truck? Because I love this example. I’m an avid cook. I cook every meal that my family eats. And so I have spent a lot of time looking at recipes, engaging with recipes, thinking about recipes and ignoring recipes.

One of the things I like about this example, and that we don’t talk about enough, is the fact that the content of a recipe, we think of recipes as kind of very structured, but also very samey, right from one to the next. You get a list of ingredients, you get a little paragraph that sort of describes what to expect, and you get a series of steps.

But the nature of those recipes can really vary a lot. If you told me you were an experienced cook, I would frame a recipe that I was giving you very differently than if you were an inexperienced cook.

And in fact, I’ve got some cookbooks that are very much geared towards, “I don’t know how to do anything in the kitchen, like just give it to me step by step” versus like I’ve got a Jamie Oliver cookbook that is fantastic and it sort of tells you how to prepare several different dishes as part of an entire meal, but it assumes a level of expertise or like confidence in the kitchen. And so it doesn’t give you like times, if you were a beginning cook, this would be very scary for you to do this, but to come in here as an experienced cook…

But I really think what I like about recipes is we can just sort of talk about it at its surface level, but we can also dig below the surface and it’s below that surface where information architecture really shines. Because now I can start thinking about when I’m giving for the same recipe, for the same dish, let’s say, do I have two different sets of content, right? Depending on the experience level of the cook. Do I kind of categorize and tag content differently so that I can alter the nature of the recipe?

Dan Brown: As I’ve been writing more, I’ve been writing about IA my whole career, but I’m in this sort of phase where I’m really actually trying to avoid metaphors. And I think this comes from information architecture long being compared to a physical space, right?

The digital virtual space that we have can be comparable to a physical space. And people have used this metaphor for decades and it bothers me to some extent because the virtual spaces that we design have so many more capabilities than we do in physical space.

For example, I can put a book down. If I put a book down in my office, I don’t have access to that book from my bedroom. Right? But there are ways to access the same piece of information from different places within a virtual space. And so that, I mean, and we can keep going on that right for an hour, but that is just one example of the ways in which metaphors fail us.

And so I’m sort of going through like an extended thought experiment of like, can I use the plainest language possible that doesn’t rely on metaphor to allow me to talk about information architecture because I feel an obligation for better or for worse to make sure the latest generation of designers feels like they can engage with IA, which some people would say is sort of a lost art, has been long ignored, is like all these things that, for one reason or another, it’s not as prominent as I think it should be. And I wanna create materials that allow people to engage with information architecture.

Noz Urbina: Okay, let’s do the taco truck. So please use your non metaphor ways of explaining to tell me about but I am the taco truck proprietor, so I have my fleet of taco trucks. How is IA gonna help me today? With as few metaphors as you can.

Dan Brown: I think if I were to talk to, I don’t know anything about the food truck business, but what’s fascinating is one of my clients is in fleet management at the moment. So I am thinking very deeply about let’s say you were the person who leases trucks to aspiring kind of food truck people. Right. So you do have a relatively large fleet.

Noz Urbina: It’s a franchise model.

Dan Brown: Right, right. The purpose, what the role information architecture plays in a business like that is to understand how all of the data that exists about your fleet of trucks and your customers who are leasing those trucks, how all of that data can be pushed up and presented to you the manager of this fleet or the owner of this franchise, or whatever it is in a way that is most meaningful for you.

So when we think about, you know, IA as content, in this case, the content is sort of the data elements. Now, I think there’s a really important distinction to make here because we can think about the structure of data as the database, but the database, the structure of the database, the tables and the columns and all of that stuff in which it’s put together is the domain of a database architect. Right?

They think about the most efficient way of storing and retrieving that data. We as information architects are kind of the other side of that coin of like, we have a bunch of data. What’s the best way to kind of weave it together to tell a meaningful story to the people who need to consume it?

Let’s say you are especially interested in making the maintenance of these trucks as efficient as possible. That’s one kind of data that you need. Do you need it all the time? Not necessarily. So how do we present that data in a meaningful flow so that you can identify what are the trucks that need maintenance right now? What are the trucks that might need maintenance in the future? How do I plan for the ongoing maintenance of my fleet? Right? All of these things are data that are creating a narrative, and that narrative I believe, is the domain of information architecture to help to kind of guide the flow of that experience.

Noz Urbina: I would say there’s multiple potential narratives through any set of information. We have this information space like I can, there are many different hallways to walk through, and depending on where I am in the information space or what my objective is, I may take different paths. And it’s your job as the architect to set those paths up for me so they’re intuitive and efficient.

Dan Brown: Yes.

Noz Urbina: So to get back to the taco part of my trucks, I’m the proprietor of my franchise have my precious recipes, my many taco related dishes. The franchisees need to execute those recipes and they need to buy stock, to understand, you know, what both proper preparation, presentation and then the logistics around, you know, how to know how much of x ingredients to order to be able to deliver recipes.

And then there’s the actual consumers, like my clients’ clients who wanna know about these recipes? Are they healthy? Are they, what allergens do they have? And are they ethically sourced? So these are all different kind of angles with which I can approach the same information set.

Dan Brown: Yes. I mean, I have nothing to add other than Yes, there is so much. This is the thing. This is the thing. And this is why I like that you’re doing kind of, you take this omnichannel lens because the world is made of data for better or for worse now, and there is going to be an increasing demand from everyday consumers all the way up to whatever, like just everybody wants access to that data and we want to do it in a way that is meaningful to us.

Dan Brown: We’re all in this business still dealing with products that are just data tables that we throw up in front of users, and you and I, as experienced designers know that.

Noz Urbina: Give an example what you mean by that.

Dan Brown: By a data table, I mean, let’s say I’m someone who’s buying a taco and I just need to know what the allergens are. Right? And you’ve seen these things. I’ve seen these things, you know, as someone with particular eating preferences, let’s say, I’ll go and I’ll look and it’s just sort of this long list of like, here’s everything on our menu. Here are all the allergens, those that are in them.

And you might, we might do some testing and realize that’s the best way of presenting that information, or maybe there are other ways of presenting it that’s more humane, that’s more respectful. Right. But everything is a data table. Everything is stored as a data table. We don’t need to present the data in that format. Right.

So I think there’s information and data kind of all the way down, right, though there’s just stacks and stacks of it, even for something as seemingly straightforward as a taco truck. And the range of people that need to engage with that service are engaging with the information that service provides in addition to the tacos themselves. And so information architecture plays a role in every part of that journey.

Noz Urbina: So if I’m the proprietor, where do I begin to, in this day and age, articulate the use cases? Like how do I justify the where and how? I think that’s the main challenge. We come back to what’s happening with information architecture. It’s the misunderstood, nobody cares lost art. So sell me on it.

Dan Brown: So here’s my pitch, and actually I would really like some feedback on this pitch. So what I do in my process, for better for worse is, we have terms like use cases, right? That we’ll use and a lot of people in software are familiar with and are comfortable with this notion of a use case.

But when I talk about a use case, I almost can’t help myself. I frame every use case as a question that a user has. That’s the whole use case. The whole use case is… I mean there’s really just a small handful that end up sort of ballooning out or reproducing in a fractal way.

One of the most simple ones is like, “What do I need to pay attention to right now?” Like, I log into my bank, what do I need to pay attention to right now? Or I log into my health portal, what do I need to pay attention to right now? Like, what’s the thing that I should really focus on? And some services do this well enough and some don’t.

Noz Urbina: I want to point out that the question doesn’t have to be consciously articulated.

Dan Brown: Right.

Noz Urbina: Questions like, I literally go on and go, “How much should I spend in my phone bill last night?” That’s a conscious question. “What should I pay attention to right now” is not, but both are completely valid.

Dan Brown: Right. Like you and I run small consulting businesses. We’re kind of watching budgets, right. And I’ll peek into my time tracking application and I’ll just kind of every week just get a sense of like, where am I with things? Which of these projects do I need to pay attention to?

Right. I think another sort of typical question that people, let’s call it the taco truck people have, are “How can I be doing better?” Right? Okay. I’m spending, you know, my expenses for these ingredients are X, how can I make it, you know, 0.9 x, right? How can I save some money on tacos or lettuce or whatever it is these days?

So there are those kinds of questions and I always come back to them and I don’t know how well they resonate with clients. They go with it, they follow the thought process. But to me that sort of the, you know intensely curious monkeys, like we always have these kinds of questions, and as you say, sometimes they’re unconscious.

Sometimes we, as people who are designing information products need to kind of compel the questions to some extent. But like getting a reminder that, hey, you should pay attention to this because you have an appointment with your doctor coming up. Or you should pay attention to this because you’re running out of lettuce in your taco truck.

Noz Urbina: Let me, you asked for feedback, so on the questions thing, you’re playing my favorite song. Those who follow me closely will know that will already have been giggling because I have been teaching a user journey mapping methodology for years. And the way that I boil down all experience analysis is questions over time.

So we start with a question. So the question you’re referring to is “what should I pay attention to?” Maybe that’s a question on a journey. But the reason that I’m in something is ’cause I have some sort of goal and that will have a question. It’s like, “How do I run a successful taco business?” Or “Where can I get a cheap, nutritious fast lunch on my pathetically short lunch break?”

So we have some sort of question, which also defines my objective. I’m trying to meet that need, and then that will break down. So if I’m Googling and then I find the taco truck website, and then I click the taco truck website that at that point I might trigger the, “okay, so what should I pay attention to on this whole landing page” question? And then each answer leads to follow up questions. And depending on who it is, they will take certain paths through those. So that part I love.

The thing that I would add is for years I’ve been talking about sort of three big metrics that I find that clients care about. And so for anybody listening, whomever you are, you’re probably at some point asking somebody else for money and or support and buy-in. And I found that the leadership people or higher up people will divide their big three questions. Everything will always ladder up to one list of big three questions.

So I think executives have main questions that they care about, which is are we growing? Is this gonna bump the top line up? Are we increasing revenues? Are we increasing if revenues are not our concern, are we increasing a user count or whatever? Whatever our main big growth metric is, are we growing it with this thing that you’re talking about?

Then there is are our customers happy? So, you know, you can be growing but pissing people off and that’s gonna be very short lived. So you have to have, it’s like the triangle. So I need to have growth, I need to have customer satisfaction and then I also need to have efficiency. ‘Cause you can be growing, you can be making people happy, but you can go outta business ’cause you’re broke.

So just about every kind of business metric, I think will ladder up to those three. So whenever you’re pitching anything, you can go, am I talking to these? Am I ticking the three boxes? ‘Cause they are anybody who’s trying to make a business decision at the end of the day, I think is gonna be interested in those.

Noz Urbina: And then recently in a project we were doing stakeholder mapping and we came up with another list of three, which is kind of like types of audience. If you’re talking about information architecture, stakeholders within an organization, so I’ve got my taco truck. And I’m gonna have different people within that organization.

I’m gonna have people who are interested in money. So they might just be interested in the growth and the efficiency question of the other three. So I’m just a money person. Like everything you’re talking about customer experience and customer satisfaction, I really don’t care as long as the money’s coming in and we’re not wasting money.

I could be an experience person, money’s not really my concern. I just wanna make people happy. I wanna make the best product we can, or service we can. And I want ’em, you know, stand out. I wanna be awarded for our wonderful experiences.

And then you have tech people who don’t really care about money, and they don’t even care about if customers happy, but they love technology. So they wanna understand like, is this cutting edge? Is it scalable? Is it, you know, integration ready? Is it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I found those two lists of three really help me structure communicating about this stuff. So it’s not a concrete like fix this in your pitch, but it’s sort of a framework to say if you touch on those, then I think that it resonates more.

Dan Brown: Fascinating. What’s interesting to me about those is that I think of those as very zoomed out questions, like I’m looking kind of my, if I have those questions, then my scope is the whole thing. And when we are building enterprise products, we are sometimes dealing with, we are often building products for people whose scope is much narrower, right?

So at the end of the day, I need to help them answer those questions, but I just might be in charge of the maintenance of the trucks that are deployed to the Northeast, right? And so I have questions about those and those questions may be more practical, like, what do I need to pay attention to? Or like, what are the trucks that need maintenance? Right. Those kinds of very specific questions.

Noz Urbina: I’m with you, but this was very meta, so this was feedback on your presentation to, let’s say the organizational stakeholder community on IA.

Dan Brown: I gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Noz Urbina: Once you’ve gotten buy-in with your pitch, then you actually get to the work of IA, which then comes back to our users’ questions.

Dan Brown: Yes. So by sort of saying, “Hey, you have these questions and our aim is to design a product or a service or an information structure that can help you, executives, answer those big questions. ‘Cause those are things you care about. And to help you answer those questions, let’s dig into your business to understand what are the questions all the way down.”

Noz Urbina: Down exactly. What are your users asking? And then say, “okay, when a user has this question today, are we efficient in answering it? Are we using the right channels? Are we giving a good experience?” And so for me that’s, you map your example use case and you say, “let’s look at the life of Terry Taco truck owner.”

They have this question. I find the that kind of narrative storytelling super useful. And it takes it outta the abstract. So for whomever’s listening, whatever your part of the business is you’re trying to get other people to relate to this. Maybe it’s IA, maybe it’s whatever you want to emphasize.

When you bring it back to narratives, to the, here’s a human being and here’s, and they’re trying to interact with our brand, that’s why I like the questions thing, so I agree with you totally on that. And then mapping that illustration of how are we doing it all with that question today and then spiking out to those other, like the three personality types and the three types of questions.

Dan Brown: Yeah. That’s cool. I like it.

Noz Urbina: So I think that’s an awesome place to start. I hope that I, and I imagine people have some useful takeaways. I like what I like about that is we’ve talked about the role of information architecture, but I think that no matter what you’re doing there’s probably some good takeaways in that discussion.

Thank you so much, Dan. We’re gonna jump over to the Truth Collapse podcast because Dan is also podcaster in his own right and does the Unchecked podcast, which looks at misinformation and the use of the skills and the assets that we’ve been talking about for how we can combat misinformation today.

And so of course is a great passion of mine. So you can join us over there on truthcollapse.com/podcast. For this episode, please do share with your friends. We are not aggressive marketers, so we do rely a lot on word of mouth. So re-shares and likes and comments and all those good things are highly appreciated. Thank you Dan so much. Any last words for the audience?

Dan Brown: I had a great time. Thanks Noz.

Noz Urbina: Awesome. Alright, we’ll see you next time and if you’re gonna join us over on Truth Collapse, see you in a little bit.