Portfolio > IA and terminology initiatives at scale
Project TL;DR
What it highlights
🤝 How I facilitated 100+ cross-functional stakeholders for strategic, high-profile projects
🎯 My wheelhouse for IA and terminology — and how I strive to make them relevant to business objectives
⚖️ How I think about the balance between delivery and operations
🦋 Lessons from trying to nurture change at scale
Why it mattered
🔎 Customers discovered overlooked features, called new navigation “deeply intuitive”
💪 12% gain in UX-Lite scores during 5-week beta, passing the test of actual usage over time
🔮 Made the product more future-friendly, demonstrated by a company hackathon
⚙️ Began to operationalize terminology decisions, aligning product concepts with company strategies
A screenshot from public launch that highlighted the newly defined IA landmarks.
Challenge
Mural’s digital whiteboard experience had become cluttered and hard to make sense of. Features had been added over the last 10 years without enough thought about their cohesive organization, navigation, and naming. Now, a major visual redesign was planned … and design leadership also saw a chance to tackle overdue UX improvements. I stepped in to catalyze and lead an information architecture (IA) initiative as part of that parent project.
How would this IA work fit into and progress alongside visual upgrades led by agency partners?
How could I choreograph the many moving, interrelated pieces across teams and divisions? And when so many product strategy decisions seemed up in the air?
How might a new IA help Mural better tell its story, show its value, and stand out in an increasingly crowded field of competitors?
How could I deliver improvements for immediate impact, while also setting up future sustainability?
And the work wasn’t done once the IA updates launched. The opportunity shifted and naturally extended to Mural’s terminology.
How could I advance the conceptual integrity of Mural’s offerings across business units, in ways that better supported the company’s highest priorities?
How could I enable and scale terminology decision-making company-wide?
Process
These initiatives were strategic, long-term projects I led over 18 months in 2022 and 2023:
A timeline, from January 2022 to May 2023, that shows 6 phases of this work: kickoff, research, proposals, convergence, execution, and evolution.
Kickoff
Familiarized myself with and adapted from IA explorations started by teammate Stephen Anderson the previous fall.
Planned and facilitated workshop sessions to:
build awareness and connections across teams.
shine light on related projects.
develop shared sense of the problem space.
learn how stakeholders prioritized and viewed key concepts.
Socialized goals and principles for the initiative.
Prioritized knowledge gaps to address with research.
Excerpt from a kickoff activity where participants voted on concepts they felt were most critical to understanding the product.
Research
Planned, set up, executed, and analyzed:
unmoderated card sorts, to reveal patterns in user associations.
moderated first-click tests, to assess trade-offs of placement options.
Similarity matrix results from a card sort.
Heat map results illustrating findings from moderated first-click and usability research.
Proposals
Visualized and shared a series of 18 recommendations — they were very deliberately modular and published in digestible, timely batches.
Prompted for feedback using an asynchronous “fist to five” activity.
Followed up and drilled down to work through points of disagreement or uncertainty.
Bird’s-eye view, excerpted from the whiteboard file of IA proposals. Said one product ops stakeholder: “There’s a ton of information there, but none of it felt daunting because of the spatial reasoning of it.”
Closer look at one of the proposals, with its confidence vote “fist to five” activity.
Convergence
Documented decisions as specifications, married with visual specs in source-of-truth Figma file — it was especially vital to make clear what we’d decided for initial release versus later on
Created resources for ongoing usage and governance, such as a document that defined each new IA landmark and videos that detailed rationale or explorations
Figma file specifications, tracking changes and updates over time, so that teams always knew what was current.
Execution
I was out on parental leave for 3 months while the big redesign neared its launch 👶
Evolution
After launch, I saw an opportunity to support new company priorities — it was an evolution of my IA concept work into a distinct initiative focused on terminology
Conducted an audit and began to socialize the “Clear Terminology Project”
Led workshops and “open house” events to bring together stakeholders around key terms in conflict across business units
Built decision-making frameworks and secured commitments for a cross-functional terminology council
Piloted decision-making operations, trying out when and how to involve C-suite approvers
Conducted survey-based research and delivered recommendations for a set of our most strategically important terms
Introduction and audit excerpt from early work on what I called the “Clear Terminology Project.”
Outcomes
Mural’s new IA was a hit, and it helped the successful landing of a highly complex redesign effort.
Changes passed the test of actual usage over time, with a 12% gain in UX-Lite scores during 5-week private beta.
Private beta participants raved about the ease of navigation: “You. Can’t. Possibly. Get. Lost.” “Everything you need is right there.” “I love that everything is super easy to find.” “More organized. The old one was unclear how things go together.”
“The anecdotes that support the hypothesis [that this] is making things more discoverable continue to pile up.” — Director of product management
Less than 2% of customers opted back to the old experience at public launch
Clear IA landmarks meant no more wondering “Where does this feature belong?!” New structures enabled teams in a company hackathon to show how the IA could be creatively, effectively built on and extended.
Information architecture as a topic became widespread, more understood, more valued across the company.
Through initiatives to operationalize terminology decisions, began to help people see a bigger picture and spark long overdue conversations about product concepts.