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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Yes! Prevention is the best cure 🤠

• Get a detailed description of the IA redesign service, the nature of the engagement, what’s included and excluded, common objections, and the pricing structure.
• Read my articles, What is information architecture consulting? and 16 common information architecture problems (with library website examples)
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