Information Architecture
You want your project to succeed, but the website is standing in the way.
Your website’s visual branding is on point. The site runs smoothly, tech-wise. Yet it’s a sensitive topic within the company.
Things are hard to find.
Your colleagues have to answer the same questions over and over.
The team publishes and updates content frequently yet you keep getting complaints that people can’t find what they need.
Since different teams are involved and different platforms are used, website visitors encounter different navigation styles and different names for the same thing. This creates a sense of disconnection, as if they’re visiting multiple sites. Subconsciously, they deem the company less trustworthy.
You’re dealing with large amounts of information, but you’re not sure how to structure it so it’s easier to discover.
The homepage and navigation features various products and call to actions, but the content hierarchy doesn’t accurately reflect key user tasks. You’re not actually sure what key user tasks, the most common reasons people visit your site, are.
Envision the following scenario
Imagine having a site that’s simple and intuitive to use.
Clients can figure out the site’s interface on their own so you spend less time on trainings and troubleshooting and more on strengthening relationships.
Onboarding is simpler.
User retention increases.
Site visits increase.
Your Customer Satisfaction Scores go up.
You can confidently talk about how the website is influencing business goals and how critical pages are performing at any time.
Customer service reps keep thanking you every time they pass you on the hall (or the #watercooler channel).
Get an information architecture redesign 👷♀️
Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring information. I’ve led the IA redesign of 30+ enterprise websites. I help teams dealing with large amounts of information structure it in a way that facilitates easier discovery.
Included in all projects
✓ Audit the current site structure and content organization to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement
✓ Interviews with users and stakeholders to gain an understanding of website needs, goals, and pain points
✓ Analytics review on metrics like most visited pages, common search terms (on search engines and on site), device breakdown, return users, referring sites, and scroll depth
✓ New IA and content wireframes for key pages
✓ Prioritized action plan for the future experience strategy
✓ Content testing plan and findings
✓ Experience influencing big and small decisions that lead to exceptional user experiences for universities, libraries, and global brands like Sony and Microsoft
Could be included
– Knowledge base taxonomy design to improve access to information for internal teams and customers
– Establishing modular content models to increase content scalability, partnering with PM and engineering teams to guide CMS implementation
– Helping you set up a simple content design testing infrastructure, writing testing plans and training content teams on how to conduct quantitative content experiments
Not included
☓ Content wireframes for every page on the site
☓ Copywriting
☓ Pixel perfect designs
☓ Semantic data infrastructure
☓ Creating user manuals and technical documentation
Ready to simplify and standardize your site’s information structure?
Are you ready to team up to untie all the content knots? Awesome! Tell me briefly about your product/service, share 2-3 potential time slots that work for you, and I’ll schedule a call.
This 30-minute intro call is to explore mutual fit (no icebreaker games) and address any immediate questions. If Little Language Models isn’t a good match for your company right now, I’ll let you know and point you to other reliable consultants or agencies. Looking forward to our conversation!
People who have worked with me highlight these strengths
Ownership
“I love working with Delfina. She has excellent ownership mentality, great communication skills, and is wonderful to chat with. She brings a positive energy to every team and is extremely reliable. I’d request her on every project if I could!”
Problem solving
“Delfina is tenacious and is always trying to help her team. I have noticed that projects trust her to fill during escalations and she puts her problem-solving hat on immediately to resolve.”
XFN collaboration
“She proactively bridges all of the disciplines together in discovery to make sure that we discover, translate, and recommend the best solutions to solve a plethora of different client challenges – from both a UX, content strategy, and engineering perspective.”
Simplicity
“Delfina is very knowledgeable about how to bring clients along and recommends the right type of strategic direction for the content strategy. She helps keep it simple and is not afraid to dig in with them and give direction if they have hurdles.”
Reliability
“I’ve consistently relied on her knowledge of user research, content design, and general UX best practices to help me be successful with the project. She’s always so organized and great about keeping the team up-to-date on what she’s working on.”
Ship it mindset
“Delfina always takes a proactive approach to her work and wastes no time jumping in and getting things done. She has thoroughly impressed me with the volume of work she does in a short amount of time which is well thought out and presented in a clear and concise manner.”
Still have questions? I have answers!
What happens after I fill out the inquiry form?
Within one business day, I’ll send you a calendar invite for our 30-minute video chat. You don’t need to prepare or share anything beforehand.
How long does an information architecture redesign take?
In an ideal world, a month, but it can take 2 or 6 or more depending on a few factors like your responsiveness, team availability, amount of content, access authorization, product maturity, number of stakeholders, and leadership buy-in.
How much do your information architecture services cost?
Pricing varies, but I strive to accomplish all the work described in the “What’s Included” section for a budget of under $10,000.
I offer extended consulting engagements (lasting over six months), and I’d be happy to discuss pricing following our initial conversations.
If you have a particular budget or timeline in mind, I’ll inform you of what I can and can’t accomplish within those limits. I believe hourly billing causes our financial incentives to be misaligned so I don’t charge by the hour. Payment is based strictly on the scope of work.
What’s the format of this work: Figma, PowerPoint, spreadsheets, something else?
A bit of everything, but you will receive a buttoned up report in a presentation format (pdf/Google Slides/ppt). My latest report was 70 pages and it included everything listed under What’s included in information architecture redesigns.
Some decision makers may only be interested in the summary. The pdf report is meant to be shared with people who may need to be consulted or informed, but aren’t involved in the day-to-day operations.
Team members responsible for the project’s success received access to a detailed spreadsheet outlining the new tree navigation of a documentation platform. They also received access to a Miro board where the audit and content wireframes live. Team members can update wireframe copy directly in Miro, unlike in the presentation.
Before the interviews, I shared documents outlining the purpose of the call and my goals with participants so they could prepare however they wanted.
I use Zoom, Slack, and email to communicate with clients and recommend weekly or biweekly check-in calls.
How will I know this “worked”?
I’ll provide guidelines and metrics to assist you in assessing whether the content is effective or not. Everything I write or rewrite during the project will of course be based on those guidelines, but you’ll be able to apply them to future content initiatives as well.
That being said, the IA I’ll redesign doesn’t exist in isolation. IA is part of the website experience. The website is part of the product experience which is part of the brand experience. In my final presentations, I frequently incorporate a brief overview of other touchpoints within the product ecosystem like the chatbot, client portal, support site, and mobile app, highlighting how these elements may be influencing user experience and overall client satisfaction.
Our audience is extremely technical so we’re looking for someone with experience writing for technical audiences, is that you?
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Some highlighted projects I worked on that had more of a technical audience focus and a brief description of my role in each of them:
| Project | My role |
|---|---|
| Vision AI hardware and software documentation site | IA redesign, content wireframes |
| Enterprise mobility and IT solutions blog | IA redesign, content wireframes |
| Elasticsearch-powered search and query engine for WordPress sites | Led content discovery and planning for a core workflow redesign (Settings); UX writing for filters, product education, and error messages |
| Data center, hardware & managed infrastructure services | Workshops, content audit, content modeling, content wireframes |
| Open-source reference library for government service delivery providers | Workshops, IA redesign, content modeling, content wireframes, naming workshop |
| Cybersecurity professionals coalition | Workshops, IA redesign, content wireframes |
| WordPress live chat plugin | Voice/tone review and rewrote the README, plugin description, and Settings page |
At my previous workplace, I ideated the intranet IA for my discipline and received a Webby Award nomination for Harvard Law Review, a redesign project where I facilitated stakeholder workshops, conducted a content audit, updated user-facing navigation, and implemented a new content model.
I love diving deep into complex domains and I have a track record of identifying messes and untangling content knots for technical audiences.
Can we just ask ChatGPT/AI to organize our website content?
Factors like human intuition (reading the room), creativity, complexity of human behavior, change management, and empathy play a crucial role in creating an effective information architecture. AI tools sometimes miss important business context and feeding it all to them will take so much time that it defeats the purpose of it saving time and reducing costs.
AI tools may occasionally overlook important context, and giving them all the necessary company information can be time-consuming, which defeats the purpose of reducing time and employee expenses.
Relatedly, current AI privacy risks like sensitive data collection, demonstrated bias, data leakage, and collection of data without the consent of the people or companies from whom it’s being collected are quite concerning to me that I can’t personally recommend relying on AI for information architecture.
In my opinion, it’s more suitable to consider AI as an intern rather than a strategist which reflects my personal experience in deriving value from it.
AI can assist you with menial tasks like taxonomy synthesis. For example, after exporting hundreds of categories and tags from a content management system, you may ask AI to group similar-sounding ones together – think duplicates that system admins may have added accidentally during the years.
For instance, medical simulation services are categorized into several distinct classifications, including disciplines, roles, and phases. Phases include Needs Assessment, Operations, Pre-briefing, Facilitation, Debriefing. Admins can tag the service to multiple classifications both within a category (tagging 2 phases: Needs Assessment, Operations) and across categories (different disciplines, roles) so they’re served to website visitors whichever page they’re on.
During the years, services and resources may have been linked to the Needs Assessment phase, but someone might have added “Assessing needs” (different phrasing) or “needs assessment” (no capital letters) or “needs asesment” (typo). Imagine dealing with thousands of these terms and having to manually review and audit them. Now imagine having a helpful intern, AI, who’s eager to help. What a relief.
I don’t think we need help after all, can we do this on our own?
You resourceful king/queen/monarch you! You can definitely try and I recommend reading Abby Covert’s fantastic book How to Make Sense of Any Mess. It’s a practical IA guide for everyone, no technical or UX background required.
Some people find that the inside-in view of employees can be limiting and a fresh, unbiased consultant’s perspective provides a better direction while costing less social capital to implement.
We’re launching something new so we don’t have an existing information architecture, can you do this for new businesses or new business lines?
Yes! Prevention is the best cure 🤠
I still have questions, how can I contact you?
Send me a message at [email protected]. I try to respond within one business day.
About me
Hi! I’m Delfina Hoxha, a lead content designer who has worked with tech startups, leading agencies, and Fortune 500 companies. I’ve successfully led the information architecture redesign of 30+ enterprise websites, which has given me the confidence and expertise to manage thousands of URLs, hundreds of acronyms, tens of content types, tertiary navigation levels, and the coordination of multiple stakeholders.
My mission is to reduce friction and frustration for people navigating the web through language & information architecture.
Ready to get started?
Fill out the information architecture form below now. If there’s a fit, we can reduce friction and frustration for people navigating the web together!
Little Language Models
Information architecture and content design consulting agency based in Vienna, serving clients around the world