Information Architecture Basics

✂️ How To Map Unintended Consequences of UX Decisions (https://lnkd.in/dprq_aGc), with practical techniques to visualize, map and start planning for unintended consequences of design decisions — with systems thinking, impact ripples, iceberg visuals and feedback loops. By Martin Tomitsch and Justin Farrugia. 🤔 Not every design outcome is predictable and linear. ✅ Small changes can set large ripple effects in motion. ✅ Users don’t act in isolation; they react to feedback loops. ✅ Immediate metrics (e.g. clicks) often mask long-term impact. 🚫 We often focus on UX flows → but overlook causality, ripples. ✅ Systems Maps visualize relationships and consequences. ✅ We study direct and indirect effects of a suggested change. ✅ Quadrant Matrix → We map changes on Impact vs. Repetition. ✅ Impact Ripple → Direct impact, Indirect Impact, Big Picture. ✅ Iceberg Model → Events, Patterns, Structures, Mental Model. No design decision exists in isolation. Often we try to use linear user journey maps to understand how people use our product or go through specific flows. We measure the impact of A/B tests to see if we achieve a desired outcome and move the needle. We track conversion, clicks, engagement. In other words, we track metrics that often hide the complexities of user interactions and relationships between features and flows in our products. Complex systems often have conflicting loops — a feature that drives short-term retention might drive long-term churn or abandonment. Often these effects are delayed, invisible and appear to be highly unlikely at first. So before focusing on fine details of a feature, it's always a good idea to sit down and explore direct and indirect impact of the changes — for different user profiles, and the different workflows that users apply daily. A great reminder that as designers we are often so focused on fine little details too early — mostly to outperform the competition in some way. But we often forget that our product must excel in user's workflows with a few critical systems, dozens of other apps and hundreds of other tabs. --- ✤ Useful Toolkits and Books: Designing Tomorrow, by Martin Tomitsch, Steve Baty https://lnkd.in/dmXEZREr Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows https://lnkd.in/dXbm5EEA Good Services: How to Design Services that Work, by Louise Downe https://lnkd.in/d5SigzvX The Great Mental Models, by Rhiannon Beaubien https://lnkd.in/dnT_GtDT Useful Books on Systems Thinking, by James Pomeroy https://lnkd.in/dH7d9exZ #ux #design

Even the best get it wrong. That’s why mapping scenarios is not optional—it’s essential. Most strategic failures don’t come from lack of data, but from failure to imagine what could happen. Here are 7 criteria for building scenarios that drive better decisions: ☑ Decision-making power ↳ Scenarios must provide actionable insight—not abstract speculation. ☑ Plausibility ↳ They should reflect futures that are genuinely possible, not fantasy. ☑ Alternatives ↳ Build multiple plausible futures—not just one “most likely” path. ☑ Consistency ↳ Scenarios must be internally logical. Without it, they lose credibility fast. ☑ Differentiation ↳ If your scenarios are just variations on the same idea, they won’t prepare you. ☑ Memorability ↳ People must remember and retell them—this is what sparks action later. ☑ Challenge ↳ The best scenarios push leadership to question assumptions and think deeper. Scenario planning isn’t about being right—it’s about being ready. Ps. if you like content like this, please follow me.

One of the best ways to align teams, stakeholders, and strategy is to make the invisible visible. That’s why I’m such a fan of mapping techniques. They help you zoom out, focus in, and uncover the things that are often hiding in plain sight. Whether it’s unclear goals, conflicting priorities, or pain points users are quietly putting up with. Here are 7 mapping techniques I keep coming back to and how I use them in delivery: 🗺️ User Story Mapping Helps me turn flat backlogs into something visually dynamic, tangible, and user-focused. I use this to map out a user's journey step by step, then slice features based on what really matters to them. It’s a brilliant way to align teams around MVPs and delivery releases. 🗺️ Impact Mapping Just like Simon Sinek this one starts with why. It links business goals to user behaviors and potential features, helping teams focus on outcomes over outputs. I’ve used it to reframe entire product roadmaps around expected impact instead of a list of things to build. 🗺️ Wardley Mapping This is more strategic and it's great for mapping components of a system by how visible they are to users and how mature they are. It’s helped me spot where we should innovate, where we can standardise, and where buying makes more sense than building. 🗺️ Dysfunction Mapping I use this when things feel off, but the problem or solution isn’t immediately obvious. It’s a structured way to identify root causes of delivery friction whether it’s misaligned priorities, unclear ownership, or recurring blockers. Great for retros and recovery plans. 🗺️ Stakeholder Mapping Simple but powerful. I use this to understand who’s influencing the project, who needs to be kept in the loop, and who we might be unintentionally leaving out. It’s especially useful when stepping into a new team or navigating complex stakeholder landscapes. 🗺️ Experience Mapping This is about stepping into the user’s shoes and walking through their journey. Not just where the product touches them, but where the experience begins and ends. I’ve used this to uncover gaps, friction points, and opportunities we hadn’t considered. 🗺️ Empathy Mapping When we’re trying to build something truly user-centric, empathy mapping helps us understand what users think, feel, say, do, and hear. It goes deeper than roles or personas and helps teams emotionally hook in with the people we’re building for. If you’re in delivery, product, UX, or transformation work there’s probably a mapping method in here that can help you in your day to day role. Let me know if I've missed any effective mapping techniques and if a deep dive into any of these would be useful!

FSG's Systems Thinking Toolkit is one of the most practical, thoughtful resources I’ve seen for turning systems thinking into actionable practice. It helps answer key questions like: 👉 What kind of mapping will surface patterns in our system? 👉 How can we bring multiple perspectives into view, equitably? 👉 What activities build shared understanding and momentum? "We tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.” The toolkit introduces tools like: 👉 Actor mapping: Visualise who’s involved and how they relate. 👉 Ecocycle mapping: Spot renewal, stagnation, and energy flows. 👉 Appreciative inquiry: Learn from what’s working and amplify it. 👉 World café & timeline mapping: Create spaces for deep dialogue and shared narrative. One standout feature is the “System Tools Matrix” which makes it easy to choose tools based on your purpose, whether you’re understanding context, diagnosing connections, or refining a strategy. "The first step in selecting an appropriate tool is to consider where you are in the systems thinking cycle" https://lnkd.in/e2XDJd4J

Scenario Planning Template (ppt download). Uncertainty is a given, but being unprepared doesn’t have to be. Combining a scenario planning tool with a robust financial model gives you a powerful framework for making informed, strategic decisions under any conditions. Every business encounters volatility, from market shifts and economic downturns to supply chain issues or unexpected competition. But great leaders don’t just react, they anticipate. They plan for multiple outcomes and are ready to adapt. That’s the value of Scenario Planning. The Scenario Planning Matrix enables organizations to visualize and plan for a range of possible futures by exploring four distinct situations: Best Case – What if everything goes according to plan—or even better? How do you scale quickly, capitalize on momentum, and capture full value? Tradeoff Cases – What if outcomes are mixed? What trade-offs, adjustments, or resource reallocations will help you stay on track? Worst Case – What if performance drops significantly? What’s your survival strategy, and how can you adapt operations to preserve cash and core capabilities? By layering these scenarios into your financial model—projecting impacts across your income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet—you gain clarity and foresight. Coupled with predefined action steps for each situation, your business becomes far more resilient and responsive. Why It Matters: Avoid reactive, short-term decisions that can hurt in the long run. Use data and financial projections to drive confident, long-term planning. Identify early-warning signals through leading KPIs to shift strategies before it’s too late. Build confidence across your team, board, and investors knowing you’re prepared for multiple outcomes. The future may be uncertain—but your strategy doesn’t have to be. Explore more about scenario planning and financial modeling at Corporate Finance Institute® (CFI) and follow Tim Vipond, FMVA® for practical tools and insights to lead with confidence.

Enterprise architecture initiatives are often planned around one future: a single target state and a single roadmap. In practice, the environment does not sit still long enough for that to hold. New regulations emerge, and advancements in AI alter where and how you create value. Most enterprise architects are trained as technologists. We are comfortable with facts, logic and pursuing certainty, yet less often with change and its implications for the organisation. Short-term delivery pressure then pushes many organisations to use EA as a drawing service or a technical advisor at best, focused solely on delivery rather than on how the enterprise adapts over time and strategic decision-making support. That is a missed opportunity. Enterprise architecture is both science and art: grounded in rigour, but dependent on innovation and creativity. Enterprise architects do not need to be the smartest people in the room, but they should be among the most imaginative — seeing patterns others miss, and helping leaders make sense of emerging possibilities. The job is to stay open to multiple futures while guiding decisions with the best knowledge the organisation has at that moment. Scenario planning gives enterprise architects a way to do exactly that. Scenarios can help create better-prepared organisations. When using scenarios in practice, here are some related concepts EA practitioners need to be aware of: → Horizon Scanning – Frame your focal question, scan for weak signals and emerging trends, then assess what each one demands of your strategy and architecture. → Scenario Development – Build 3–4 coherent, plausible futures (many foresight practitioners argue for at least four). These are not predictions or simple best- or worst-case scenarios, but distinct stories or narratives of how the future could unfold. → Wind-Tunnelling – Take your current strategies and test each against your scenarios. Find what breaks, what holds, and what you would regret locking in before you commit. Shape and test the strategy first, then design the technology to support it. → Designing for Optionality – Classify decisions by how hard they are to undo. Build multiple transition paths. Depending on whether you are exploring or shaping the future, consider using backcasting or wind-tunnelling to inform your roadmap with several ways of looking ahead, not just one. Visualise your roadmaps and options using artefacts such as sun-ray diagrams to improve communication. The infographic illustrates these four concepts and shows how to think about futures using the Futures Cone, with sources for each concept if you want to learn more.

The most underrated skill in creative work has zero to do with taste. ↓ It's systems thinking. The ability to look at creative work and visualize the architecture underneath that drives it from ideation to execution. So where the inputs come from, how decisions get made, and what happens to the outputs after they ship. Every creative I know who charges 3-5x their peers has this skill in common. And oddly enough, nobody taught it in design school and nobody calls it a creative skill. I built a visual content system for a brand team about a year ago. With just a few days of work, I was able to extract the brand's visual DNA, map asset types, build prompt architecture, and install a review workflow that caught problems before they compounded. That system still produces about 500+ assets a month for them. And I haven't had to touch it since. The person who helped me build it now runs the whole operation. Meanwhile, the people who default to figuring it out each and every time are still doing everything the hard and painful way. When the tools generate at speed, the constraint shifts upstream to whoever built the system the tools run inside. AI has made this gap impossible to ignore. Most creatives still haven't learned to think at that level. They learned the taste and craft, but they either scoffed or blissfully ignored the architecture. The creatives who learn to think in systems will be impossible to compete with while the rest will just keep being busy. Systems thinking is what turns a creative professional into creative infrastructure. And infrastructure is what people actually pay for. Build the machine once. Let it compound. Tweak as tech capabilities change. Rinse and repeat. That's the skill nobody's teaching.

At Microsoft, I created a framework called "Book of Dreams." Each one was a Portfolio of Future Value: Sales and field teams worldwide used them to shape multi-million-dollar digital transformation conversations. One banking team attributed $60M in new pipeline in the first six months. The building block of every Book of Dreams was a single pattern. The 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻. Here's how it works: 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: Technology → Features → Hope customers care. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: Customer Pain → Desired Outcomes → Business Value → Solutions. That single flip changes everything. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 What is painful 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺? Not what you think is painful. What customers and employees are 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨. → Missing information → Too much manual work → Fragmented tools → Slow response times Pain creates urgency. Pain reveals opportunity. No pain = no scenario worth building. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 Here's the part most people miss. 𝗡𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆. Just outcomes: → Better visibility → Better decisions → Better experiences → Smoother journeys If you name the technology too early, you constrain the innovation. Describe the destination first. The path will follow. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 Every scenario has a leader who owns it. The CMO cares about loyalty and acquisition. The COO cares about productivity and margin. The CPO cares about retention and time-to-value. Name the role. Name what they need. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗼 One scenario is an idea. Ten scenarios, organized by Customer, Employee, and Operations, is a 𝗣𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗼 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲. Not features. Not a roadmap. A strategic map of 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥. This is what leaders can actually prioritize. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀: Traditional planning forces you to compete at the feature level. This model keeps the focus on: Experience → Outcomes → Value. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: It answers the hardest question in innovation: "𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁?" Instead of debating ideas, leaders see: → the problem → the desired outcome → the business value And can prioritize the scenarios that create the most impact. The Customer Scenario Pattern: Current State → Customer Pain Desired Future State → Better Outcomes Stakeholder Value → Business Impact Portfolio of Scenarios → Future Value Roadmap I built this at Microsoft. I've taught it to leaders around the world. It works in every industry. At every scale. Start with customer reality. The solutions will find themselves. 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵?

Many designers still think in pages: • The dashboard page • The checkout page • The settings page • The profile page Founders and engineering teams don’t think in pages. They think in systems: • Patterns • Constraints • Components • Behaviours that scale across the product When someone says “we want a designer with strong systems thinking”, they’re asking: “Can this person create order once, so we don’t have to fight chaos every time we ship?” Here's an example 👇 A team I worked with had: • 6 modal styles • 4 different form layouts • 9 different button styles • Every squad shipping their own version “just this once” The result? • Higher bug count • Inconsistent experience • Engineers copying old screens The designer who changed everything didn’t start with another UI refresh. They: 1. Audited the product and documented every recurring pattern: buttons, inputs, cards, tables, error states. 2. Created a component library + tokens: • Clear rules for spacing, typography, colours, states • A small set of primitives that could be combined for 80% of use cases 3. Wrote usage guidelines in plain language: • “Use this variant when…” • “Don’t do X because it breaks Y” 4. Sat with engineers to wire those patterns into the codebase. In 3 months: • New features shipped ~30% faster • UI bugs related to “misaligned / wrong styles” dropped sharply • The product suddenly felt like it came from one mind, not six That’s systems thinking. 🔥 Not “I made a component library in Figma”, but “I created a language the whole team can design and build in”. P.S. this is also where a design systems or designops specialist can help... #careers #productdesign #johnisaac #design #ux #ai #startups