Information architecture (IA) is the backbone of the web — and essentially every other digital experience. It’s the system that’s used to organize and label content on websites in apps, and it ultimately determines the paths that people take to find what they’re looking for.

IA also underpins the design. Functioning as a kind-of skeleton beneath the polished veneer of what people see, it’s the foundation. Get it wrong, and the house falls down. A poorly thought-out IA and UX may not always cause your target audience to leave a website and look elsewhere, but the odds are certainly higher.

A good IA can make all the difference. …

Looking for the too long, didn’t read? We’ve just released a new magazine and we think you should check it out.

In addition to working on a great set of tools to help user researchers and designers, we like to publish content here at Optimal Workshop too. Typically, this content is blog posts, feature release updates, case studies and support articles — but we also like to branch out.

So, with just a little fanfare 🎉, here’s the first issue of our new digital magazine focused on UX — CRUX! This is certainly a labour of love for us, and we’re really excited to see what you think. …

You’re ready to run your next research project. You’ve collaborated with the product team on the problem space, there’s buy-in and budget — now what?

Well, it’s time to look at an essential part of the research workflow: the research tool stack. I know, I can already hear the grumblings. “Why do we even need a tool stack?” and “Why do I even have to think about this? Why can’t I just keep using [insert popular user research tool here]?”. Well, I’m about to tell you why.

We’ve done a LOT of research in our time here. That’s only natural, we build user research tools for people like you. And, in that time, we’ve learned a lot about matching the right tools to the right methods, and what you need to consider when integrating all of these tools together. What’s more, we’ve got a fairly good idea of some of the other tools you should consider which can make your life as a researcher much, much easier. …

What a year 2020 has been. We’ve seen massive disruption to the ways we live and work, and it’s fair to say that nearly every area of the globe has been affected.

For researchers, designers and everyone else building products and services, the chaos and uncertainty of the past few months have shown just how important it is to place the user experience at the heart of every design decision.

Whether you work in a design lab in London or a social media agency in Chicago, now is the time to get to grips with the issues your users are dealing with and figure out how you can best position yourself to help solve them. …

One of the most common topics of conversation that I come across in research circles is how to deal with the administrative burden of user research. I see it time and again — both junior and experienced researchers alike struggling to balance delivering outputs for their stakeholders as well as actually managing the day-to-day of their jobs.

It’s not easy! Research is an admin-heavy field. All forms of user testing require a significant time investment for participant recruitment, user interviews mean sorting through notes in order to identify themes and different qualitative methods can leave you with pages of spreadsheet data. …

The field of user research has changed dramatically in recent years. In many organizations across the globe, research has grown from the remit of a lone, under-resourced designer or product manager to a fully-fledged practice with multiple researchers sitting in different teams and with radically different targets. Of course, this isn’t true of every organization, but more people are starting to understand the value of research, especially the competitive advantage that it can deliver.

Enter ResearchOps. Like its cousin DesignOps, this new practice has grown out of a need to operationalize and socialize the user research. It’s certainly the right time. With research growing, industry-wide processes, templates and best-practices can ensure that organizations are running research operations correctly. …

Back in early 2018, user researchers from around the globe got together to try and define an emerging practice — ResearchOps. The project eventually grew into a significant research effort called #WhatisResearchOps, involving 34 workshops, a survey that garnered over 300 responses and reams of analysis.

The goal was quite simple. Generate conversation around the work that researchers do in order to support them as research grows, with an eye toward standardizing common research practices. It’s an important undertaking: a report back carried out in 2017 found that 81 percent of executives agreed that user research made their organization more efficient. …

Picture this scenario: You’re in your local coffee shop and hear a new song. You want to listen to it when you get back to the office. How do you obtain it? If you’re one of the 232 million Spotify users, you’ll simply open the app, search for the song and add it to your playlist. Within seconds, you’ll have the song ready to play whenever and wherever you want.

This new norm of music streaming wasn’t always the status quo. In the early days of the internet, the process of finding music was easy but nowhere nearly as easy as it is now. You’d often still be able to find any song you wanted, but you would need to purchase it individually or as part of an album, download it to your computer and then sync it across to a portable music player like the iPod. …