IA Lenses: A New Tool for Designing Digital Structures with Dan Brown

t’s been 20+ years since the advent of IA, isn’t it about time we had more tools for our work? Enter IA Lenses, a new tool to help IAs evaluate and interrogate their concepts by looking at them from unique perspectives.

Information architecture remains the hardest part of the design process because it deals with abstractions. Even if you’re designing a navigation system, that part of the UI reveals only a small part of the underlying structure. Since design thrives on critique, and it’s difficult to critique something that’s abstract, designers need better tools for making decisions about a product’s information architecture.

After designing navigation websites and frameworks for digital products for 20 years, I realized that on every project I asked myself the same set of questions about the underlying structural decisions. These questions are the very critique that helps me move the design process forward.

Each question is a lens, through which I examine the structure. I choose a label for a category and ask myself, “What’s missing from the implied contents of this label?” I nest one category in another and I ask myself, “Even though this belongs here, does it bury an important concept?” I develop a set of top-level categories and ask myself, “What story does this tell about the organization?” The purpose of these lenses isn’t so much to determine correctness, but more to look at my decision from all angles. They let me dig deeper into my decisions to make sure my thought process is robust.

In this session, I’ll share some of the lenses, how they’re used, and how you might apply them to different IA challenges. As a consequence of articulating these lenses, I’ve also come to some realizations about the practice of information architecture itself.