Content modelling is often seen as complicated spreadsheets produced by content designers that can feel abstract and not directly related to the rest of the design process.
My mission was to embed information architecture and content modelling techniques into our ideation process.
My process
Step 1
To start I ran a workshop in collaboration with the research team as I felt it was important the mapping was grounded in concrete examples from user interviews. I adapted Sophie V Praxter's Object Orientated UX and simplified it to the needs of our team. After this session our teams had mapped out all the main 'objects' for our project.
Step 2
Next, I produced a more comprehensive maps of all the objects and how they related to each other but I felt that designers and product managers on our team still found this abstract and struggled to understand how this related to the interface.
Step 3
To address this, I paired with a senior designer to come up with a sketching work session where we mapped the objects per page this helped the team understand how the wider content model affected the interface and how we needed to design the pages so the relationships we mapped out were visualized and understood by users.
Outcome
This process was a great way to introduce a content-first design process to the team. This project is not yet launched but information architecture and hierarchy we produced have acted as the foundation to our latest designs. I also saw a change in the way designers on our team understood and used information architecture in their conception process. Now we always start each new exploration by mapping the content and tasks before jumping into high fidelity sketches.