To schedule an appointment, you’ll need to provide some details about your product or service and share some background info (challenges, goals, timeline). 

When scheduling the call, you’ll be able to select your communication platform of choice (Zoom or Google Meet).

If you want to include team members besides yourself in the call, you’ll have the option to add them as guests when scheduling in Calendly.

After scheduling the call, you’ll receive an email confirmation with a link to our upcoming meeting. The event will be added to your calendar.

Please check your spam folder if you haven’t received any emails after scheduling and message me at hi@littlelanguagemodels.com if you’re encountering technical difficulties.

The 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.

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.

I aim to complete the outlined information architecture services within a budget of $20,000 or less.

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.

I offer extended information architecture consulting engagements (lasting over 3 months), and I’d be happy to discuss pricing following our initial conversations.

These are some of the information architecture activities I do during a project, listed in a roughly chronological order:

1. Stakeholder interviews
2. Analytics review
3. User interviews
4. IA and content audit
5. Findings summary
6. New information architecture (sitemaps, content modeling)
7. Content wireframes for key pages
8. Content testing plan and findings
9. Final report

The table below provides a quick overview of activity formats. For details, see my article: Information architecture activities and formats.

During our first meeting, I ask questions to understand the outcomes you’re looking for. What does success look like for this project? How might we measure success? Why are you interested in doing this now? Are there any initiatives that may affect or depend on this work? Do we have leadership support for this initiative?

Not everything is measurable, but it’s generally easy to think of and track important metrics in the context of websites and apps.

Outcomes include more conversions, increased user retention, and decreased customer service costs. Metrics include task difficulty, time on task, site visits, search terms, return users, rage clicks, and Customer Satisfaction Scores.

• A potential client wanted their site to bring in more leads. They had received user feedback that the site was overdesigned and frustrating.
• A client aimed to expand their pipeline and improve success rates from the first time AI engineers landed on the platform to importing sample models, verifying inference, and tuning a model.
• Another client wanted to reduce customer support requests and the volume of unqualified scholarship applicants.
• A client was migrating 30 local sites to a new architecture and wanted to ensure they were covered from a content perspective.
• I’ve been brought in by clients to design a minimum viable product (MVP) that would help them define the Request for Proposal (RFP) scope and find the right technical partner for platform implementation.
• I’ve been brought in to secure leadership buy-in.

A clear definition of success sets us up for success and ensures we’re not spending time or energy on initiatives that won’t move the needle.

I’ll provide a walkthrough of key user flows, what’s going well, and what could be improved, and you’ll be able to apply these guidelines to future content initiatives. You’ll also see the before and after for the new experience strategy, where I’ll showcase content elements in a hierarchy that matches key user needs and business goals, and explain how I assess content effectiveness.

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.

The article below provides a more detailed response. To summarize, my recent experiences with language models for website information architecture redesigns have been unsatisfactory. I also have some concerns unrelated to AI’s technical capabilities. I’ve found AI keyword clustering to be helpful for taxonomy synthesis in large-scale content audits.

Every day, we depend on the digital interfaces of countless products and services, yet many of them remain frustrating and difficult to navigate. But there’s a way to change this and I’m determined to make that change – through client work, yes, but also by frequently sharing free actionable resources on how to spot, fix, and prevent information architecture issues.

Besides Little Language Models guides, other information architecture resources I recommend include:

• Abby Covert’s book How to Make Sense of Any Mess – a practical IA guide for everyone, no technical or UX background required
• Lisa Maria Marquis’ book Everyday Information Architecture – another practical guide covering the basics of LATCH, content analysis, categories, navigation, and taxonomies

Yes! Prevention is the best cure 🤠