Organization System

Information Architecture: Making it easier for Designers to find and discover work

Newly onboarded designers (like me back in 2021 at O’Reilly) had difficulty knowing where to find and place their files in FIGMA. The lack of structure was a cause for confusion and frustration and this often led designers and other stakeholders getting lost while hunting for files and deciding where to place their own;

I decided to structure our Figma workspace so that as a team we could intuitively and confidently find and place design files.

I volunteered to solve this problem sometime after joining O’Reilly Media and defined an organization scheme (system) for design artifacts in Figma.

The following screen shows the previous organization scheme:

Research and Requirements: Understanding how designers individually organize and think about their work

I interviewed all the designers on the team (about 6 people back then), and learned how they individually organize and structure their work. I learned about the type of artifacts they typically made, and how they labelled and organized them.

I then defined a list of requirements based on those interviews to inform the design of an organization scheme.

I defined the following list of requirements based on findings from those interviews:

I designed a hybrid scheme with a hierarchical structure with key use cases represented at the top level (the solution).

I designed a hybrid scheme, which combined elements of audience, topic and task-oriented schemes. (this is due to multiple use cases Figma covers for our team)

While it might be harder to form a mental model at the highest level due to this mixture of schemes (You have to scan each item to find what you’re looking for), reducing the number of options at the top level of the hierarchy (the breath) would mitigate this problem. (3 items are easier to visually scan and make sense of than 10)

The new structure made files more discoverable and reduced the amount of effort it took to find and navigate to them while also improving our work’s visibility.

While the proposal received plenty of positive impressions, it also (naturally) received some questions related to visibility scale and coverage. Some of the designers were concerned about receiving unsolicited feedback from outsiders.

I proposed a solution which adapted a process most designers were comfortable. The adoption of the framework and by extension work’s visibility to external stakeholders was the individual designer’s discretion. They could choose to either grant or restrict access to their work as they saw fit.

The system has so far been adopted by 3/5 of the designers on the team. I received additional suggestions which I'd later incorporate to strengthen its integrity.

The new structure directly improved our team collaboration processes, it made it easier to make sense of how files are organized in our repository (Figma) and was later favorably received by the rest of the team 👍