Information architecture makes content findable and puts features in context. It makes your product’s experience sustainable, meaningful, and scalable.
Only information architecture can confront increasing product complexity, AI's probabilistic outcomes, and the greater demands on enterprise software.
Your product is straining with features added over the years. Your site’s navigation is unable to accommodate new content or new audiences. Your product suite is unwieldy, grown through acquisition and unbridled expansion. Your service offerings, fraught with exceptions, have become convoluted.
Your product has structural problems.
We help product teams unwind and correct structural problems in...
We help product teams prepare and define frameworks for…
We produce high-fidelity screen designs, but also clickable prototypes, user journeys, site maps, and experience flows to document the experience. We conduct just enough research, integrating results directly into design artifacts. We are...
Disciplined
Producing practical outputs and taking a deliberate, thoughtful approach to design.
Flexible
Anticipating change and adapting to new circumstances, inputs, and stakeholders.
Collaborative
Drawing in the whole team, integrating diverse perspectives, ensuring every voice is heard.
Transparent
Using working sessions, regular design reviews, and communications tools to stay aligned.
Advisory Board
Alcatel-Lucent
American Chemical Society
American Psychological Association
Association of Social Work Boards
AstraZeneca
Box
Cisco
Crown Castle
EAB
eBay
FDIC
FireEye
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Interfolio
JLL
Kelly Services
Knowledge2Practice
Lockheed Martin
Marriott
National Council of
Architecture Review Boards
NetApp
Netflix
PayPal
Riot Games
Sesame Workshop
Sonatype
Travelers
US Department of Energy
World Bank
Projects with Curious Squid combine three modes of engagement, configured to suit your team, budget, and goal:
Advice
Integrating information architecture approaches and methods into your practice.
Leadership
Directing the efforts of user experience design and research teams.
Delivery
Creating UX strategy, information architecture blueprints, research results, and design artifacts to feed development.
If your team needs a quick tune-up, to build some momentum, or even an intervention, Curious Squid offers smaller engagements, like:
Coaching
Weekly chats with individual contributors for guidance on information architecture and UX best practices.
Workshops
Intensive, collaborative working sessions to untangle complex problems with your extended team.
Training
Leveling-up your team's skills in information architecture, facilitation, and design discovery, among others.
However we work together, Curious Squid directly faces your challenges for product design and structure, targeting the hardest parts of the problem while keeping the broader context in mind.
We know this ocean
Curious Squid principal Dan Brown has 30 years experience in information architecture, user research, and user experience design.
Dan wrote 3 books on user experience design. Communicating Design (2010), widely considered essential reading, describes UX design deliverables. Designing Together (2013) offers a how-to guide for collaboration and conflict management. Practical Design Discovery (2017) establishes a flexible framework for doing discovery in fast-moving environments.
Dan created a card game called Surviving Design Projects to help teams work through challenging situations. Dan has facilitated the game with countless teams and workshops all over the world.
To bring information architecture tools to more designers, Dan created the Deck of IA Lenses, a set of cards with prompts for evaluating information architecture work.
The deck inspired the podcast A Lens A Day, in which Dan interviewed more than 50 practicing designers about their unique perspectives on the practice of design.
