What methods do you personally use for your IA and planning needs? Do you make sitemap diagrams? How do you break down the information you need? At which point do you stop?
I’m beginning to get more involved with these steps in the planning phase and want to see how others use it and maybe steal some techniques.
I like to use BPMN to display the business processes that exist.
And for proper architecture I have used arc42 before. It’s a huge document that explains many many steps.
When I’m talking technical, I’ll use some other flow to display that communication between services. For example plant uml, but I’ll often start on a whiteboard for it for brainstorming.
Generally, I use a whiteboard a lot while I plan and brainstorm. It’s chaotic and not meant to be readable. Then I’ll write a document that’ll explain what I want more precisely. Nowadays I used AI to help me structure such documents.
I give the AI the template and an introduction to what I want to talk about in this document. Then I’ll instruct the agent to ask me 3 questions per headline of the template and I’ll answer them. The agent should also ask followup question if something is unclear. By the end of it I’ll have a structure document that’ll have the information I provided.
I hope that helps. I never worked with sitemaps to structure content, but I’d probably also do a flow on a whiteboard for it. Everything is a diagram.
This topic kind of kept creeping into my mind, so I now looked more into it and stumbled upon this article. I skimmed it quite broadly, but it seems to have a lot of useful information to your question of Information Architecture.
For beginners we’d recommend very simple sketching between outlines and bulletpoints, and try to standardize with each iteration.
It’s imperative that you envision the workflow first, then cut out all the unnecessary interactions, and form that into a flowchart-ish sketch.