Establish Structure & Findability

Structure is about organizing your content and features so users can easily find what they need. Even the best content becomes useless if people can’t locate it or understand how to navigate to their goals.

Good structure matches how users think about your content, not how your organization is internally organized. It creates logical pathways that feel intuitive and reduces the mental effort required to use your site or application.

During this phase, you’ll create site maps, navigation systems, and content organization that directly supports user tasks. You’ll also consider search and filtering options that help users when browsing isn’t enough.

Planning & Design Activities

These foundational activities help you create and organize your site’s structure before involving users. Use your scope decisions and user stories to inform how content and features should be logically arranged. These methods transform your defined features into organized, navigable structures that support user goals.

Start with the big picture—how major sections relate to each other—then work down to specific page layouts and content groupings.

Validation Methods

These research methods help you test and refine your structural decisions with real users before and after implementation. Use these approaches to validate that your planned organization actually makes sense to your target audience and supports their mental models.

Testing structure early prevents costly redesigns and ensures your final organization truly serves user needs rather than internal assumptions.

When testing structure and findability, consider the following method:

Ask Yourself

This phase balances user mental models with practical constraints of content management and technical implementation. You’ll want to consider:

• Does my structure reflect how users think about this content, not how my organization works?
• Can users predict where to find information based on my navigation labels?
• What happens when browsing fails—do users have effective search and filtering options?
• Are my most important user tasks supported by clear, direct paths through the site?

Use your established user personas and journey maps to validate structural decisions. Test early and often to ensure your organization truly serves user needs rather than internal convenience.