Tools


IA book

IA Practitioners Book Club

A seven week book club reading and building on How to Make Sense of Any Mess, with a monthly opportunity to ask me questions live on Zoom

How to diagram

Diagramming Video eCourse

A deep dive into the purpose, process and craft of diagramming. This video eCourse is meant for beginners but helpful to all levels of diagrammatic experience.

Learn IA for free

Free IA Course

I wrote this 30 minute free course called “Information Architecture for Everybody” to provide a plain language, wider view of what information architecture looks like and how it impacts businesses everyday.

Two hand drawn word bubbles

Control Your Vocabulary

Words are the common material we use when working with others. This exercise involves deciding the words you do and do NOT use as a team or in a specific context.

Illustration of a hierarchical structure.

Play with Structure

There are many ways to structure any one thing. This crib sheet is meant to give you some starting patterns to consider when making architectural decisions.

Illustration of five circles connected by a dotted line.

Measure the Distance

Goals are only reachable when progress is both possible and measurable. This exercise is about understanding what to measure along the way to know how things are going.

Illustration of switches, knobs, and sliders.

Diagram Your Reality

Reality is a force we all must reckon with in time. This exercise is about facing reality by digging into the contributing and limiting factors involved.

Illustration of three different shapes, a circle, triangle, and a cross each next to illegible text.

Choose Your Words

When facing a mess, stating your intention is the most important step you can take. This is an exercise about letting go and thinking about how users ideally perceive your work.

Illustration of a basic structure.

Draw Your Mess

By visualizing and verbalizing whatever mess you face, you can start to honestly confront it. This is a simple exercise proven to slay mind-monsters.

Illustration of two speech bubbles with illegible text. One has a question mark.

Interview Stakeholders

A repeatable approach to interviewing stakeholders with guidance on each step from selling this activity, all the way through interview planning, execution and analysis.

Illustration of a magnifying glass with the letters IA in it.

Information Architecture Heuristics

I developed this set of heuristics to serve as an easy to understand and implement set of principles anyone could use to make the information architecture of their work better.

Illustration of a laptop with the letters IA on the screen.

Introduction to IA Video Course

I developed this course with Pluralsight to introduce the concepts of information architecture and give you confidence in practicing it.