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The person you call when nobody can find anything.
Search
Apr 22, 2026
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5 min read
Most people look at their search metrics and see numbers. What they should be seeing is a conversation their customers are trying to have with them. Here's how to read it.
Newsletter
Apr 7, 2026
7 min read
From Latin to prison slang: the vocabulary gap hiding in your catalogue
Taxonomy
Apr 5, 2026
4 min read
When customers can't find what they're looking for, they don't complain, they leave. Here's what that's quietly costing you.
Navigation
Apr 2, 2026
Mar 21, 2026
Google recently named a new Sheets feature "People Chips." It's caused a stir, and not in a good way. But the real question isn't whether the label is odd; it's how a company with Google's resources ended up there in the first place.
Nov 29, 2023
Your site search is broken. Before you can fix it, you need to understand what you're actually fixing. Here's a plain-English guide to what's inside a search engine and why each component shapes the results your customers see.
Nov 22, 2023
Information architecture tells you what a product contains and how it connects. Service design tells you why it works the way it does. Most projects use one or the other. The ones that use both are the ones that avoid expensive surprises.
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 8, 2023
Information architects have been quietly solving one of the web's oldest problems: people can't find things. The job title is obscure, the discipline is misunderstood, and most businesses don't know they need one until something goes badly wrong.
Jun 1, 2022
Navigation is the thing your users should never notice. So how do you test something that's supposed to be invisible? The answer is simpler than you'd expect, and it changes everything about how you set up your research.
May 9, 2022
Most navigation projects start with a complaint and end with a guess. Benchmarking gives you a before-and-after you can actually defend, evidence that secures budget, and a way to know whether what you built is better than what you replaced.
Your website isn't broken by accident. Something specific went wrong, and somewhere in your data, your users are trying to tell you what it is. The trick is knowing where to look, and what counts as a signal rather than noise.
Methodology
May 2, 2022
Everyone in digital throws around words like "qual", "quant" and "benchmarking" as though they mean the same thing. They don't. Here's what each term actually means, why the distinctions matter, and how to use them to ask better questions about your product.
Apr 24, 2022
Card sorting looks like a rigorous way to design navigation. In practice, it excludes a significant portion of your users, generates data that rarely survives contact with a real interface, and cannot do the one job people keep using it for. Here is what you need to know before you run another sort.
Most navigation problems aren't really navigation problems. They're labelling problems, or structure problems, or both. Card sorting is one of the most useful tools for diagnosing which one you're dealing with, but only if you use it correctly.
Apr 21, 2022
You've given customers everything they could possibly want. So why are they leaving empty-handed? The problem isn't your catalogue. It's the cognitive weight of having to choose from all of it.
Apr 6, 2022
Your search bar is there. People are using it. So why aren't they converting? The problem might not be your products or your prices. It might be noise, and it is quieter and more destructive than you'd think.
Your search engine doesn't know that "bum" and "bottom" mean the same thing unless you tell it. Synonyms are the configuration layer that bridges the gap between your language and your customers'. Here's how they work and why most sites don't use them.
Relevant results get clicked. Irrelevant ones get ignored. Here's what relevancy actually means and why it decides whether your search is working.
Mar 28, 2022
If people are Googling their way around your website rather than using your onsite search, you have a problem. A serious one. The bigger the site, the bigger the problem.This is not a quirk. It is a signal.
Mar 23, 2022
Your navigation is making people leave. Not because your content is bad, but because they can't find it. Mega menus and burger menus are two of the most argued-about patterns in web design, and almost everyone has the wrong opinion about both of them.
Mar 15, 2022
That little flag icon in your navigation looks helpful. It is not. Using national flags to represent language selection is one of the most persistent mistakes in navigation design, and it costs you users every time.
