It has been some time since I last penned my thoughts, but this one holds significance. Several months ago, I resigned from my role as the VP of Design at a successful scale-up. Despite the high salary, my responsibility to oversee an eight-person team, and our exciting product lineup, I chose to move on.

During my time working at various companies, I've noticed a recurring issue in many organisations. Inefficient operations that lead to tasks taking much longer than they should, despite having sizable teams. 

For example, a basic audit would require extensive preparation, research, report writing, sharing, and presenting and could take days to weeks to complete. 

Conducting a competitor analysis took no less than two weeks, and even designing a simple solution would take several days just for product research and ideation. 

It's hard not to compare to one of my previous roles, where a small but efficient team consisting of one designer and two developers was able to deliver rapidly across multiple channels and three different products.

I resigned because my goal was to tackle the issue at an industry level instead of devising a solution solely for one company.

In the past, I have tried different approaches to enhance our work processes. I have explored various methods of running UX audits, conducting user tests, and shipping products, always striving to find ways to make things more efficient and putting systems in place. It occurred to me that I should share these techniques with others.

I began by creating a YouTube channel where I tested some of my hypotheses, one of which was included in my UX Audit Video. However, I soon realised that this approach was not efficient or scalable enough. As a result, I began to experiment, research, and engage with other Product Designers in the field. Through these interactions, I discovered that many of my colleagues face similar challenges. I shared my idea with fellow designers and product managers and received positive feedback, with many agreeing that tools like this were necessary.

With that knowledge, I shared the idea with a close friend who is a seasoned engineer to assist me with the project. He loved and could relate to the similar challenges he faced in his workplace. We both recognised the problem as something worth solving.

As we worked on our product and shared our designs with others, we came to the realisation that our vision would require more than just the two of us to bring it to life if we wanted it out in anything less than three years. 

While we continued to research and improve our product, we received interest from several investors. One call, in particular, stood out to us, as we had great chemistry with the two people we spoke with (more on them later).

We decided that raising capital would allow us to build a team, focus on the core product and make strategic investments in areas we believe have strong potential for the future (more on this later as well).

Next-Gen Product Research & Development Platform

As more and more companies adopt product-focused models, it's evident that our research, design, and development methods require a facelift. This is where we step in. We aim to transform how we approach and conceptualise these pivotal phases of the product lifecycle. By questioning established norms and expanding horizons, we're committed to positively impacting the industry we deeply care about.

Our aim is to alleviate experts from monotonous and repetitive tasks, thus facilitating product teams to work and collaborate more efficiently. This enables experts to concentrate on their specialised expertise and add more value to their products, customers, business and team.

We're going to enable product teams worldwide to create exceptional digital experiences. 

We believe that simplifying access to innovative design concepts and solutions will make the design process more efficient, faster, and effective for digital product designers and managers. 

Therefore, we are building a comprehensive collection of interfaces curated by experts from the best digital products. Our library will help product designers discover relevant design concepts and resources with significantly less time and effort.

And we'll research, design and create it all from there. Stay tuned.

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So, a sitemap, it’s what us designers like to show off to other people to prove that we are capable of doing complicated things. But it’s not complicated. Let’s unpack sitemaps.

There are a lot of things we need to cover to explain sitemaps such as:

It’s how people navigate your app, website or platform. Just like how buildings have blueprints/floor plans that give us a high-level view of a structure, a sitemap essentially does the same thing.

The hierarchy and relationship of each section and at what level each section lives

How a user moves through each section and a high-level user flow

What pages exist, for reference and better management

It can showcase additional information such as type of page, and high-level view of components that live on a page, to get a better understanding of both the macro information architecture and the macro and more

A sitemap is not the information architecture; a sitemap is one piece of the information architecture.

Which pages are related and can therefore share the same template

The user’s movement and flow within our website or app

Guiding the flow a user goes through in order to discover specific information

Mapping out different elements that we need in each page at a high level, to again define the complexity of each section

Honestly, with smaller websites you can get away with not building one as the navigation itself can act as your sitemap. Smaller projects, such as a 5-page website, would usually be 1 or maybe 2 levels deep of information and there’s not a lot you would want to map out as the relationship between the pages would be fairly clear.

However, almost every medium to large projects can benefit from having a nice and thorough sitemap.

The idea is to look at a sitemap and quickly understand what is going on, how the website flows and understand the relationship between each section.

I believe we can all understand and relate to an eCommerce website so let’s create an example around that. Let’s imagine that our client is a furniture store and they have approached us in order to improve their website experience by redoing their website architecture.

Every project starts with a nice heuristic evaluation of any existing information and assets. I would start by evaluating the current flow of information from their current website and map out how a customer gets around on the current site. I would also note down any issues I came across on their platform.

This can be a simple spreadsheet or document; nothing fancy is really required.

NOTE: If this is a brand new website then I would completely skip this step and go to step 2.

Audit every single thing that would live on the site. This includes anything and everything such as about page, blog and article pages, contact page, different products, FAQs and everything else.

This step is crucial in order to grasp the size of the project and how we might approach it.

Again, a simple spreadsheet or word document will do. I use Google Docs and Sheets for these exercises.

If our client has any data, we want to know about it.

And as much other information as we can collect. A great place to start is through any analytics tool our customer may be using; most people have Google Analytics and you’d be surprised how much data you can find there.

Probably the most important step. There is SO MUCH we can learn from what competitors are doing.

In this section, we want to understand not only what our competitors are doing but also why they’re doing it.

How do their customers move around their site?

And so much more. If you skip anything in the research phase, don’t let it be this.

Whether the company already has personas or we need to create them, it’s important to understand our customers:

What to prioritise for them in terms of content and flow?

Based on all the information we collected, we can now sketch out some quick concepts. You see, sketching is a great tool in the concept stage of any design process as it doesn’t take too long and it usually doesn’t need to look great. We can quickly create concepts of multiple ideas without getting attached to one.

Honestly, it does not matter what you use; whether it’s paper and post-its notes, or an app, use something that you’re most comfortable and familiar with.

If I need to collaborate with my team in a workshop:

If I need to put something together super quick:

If I need it to look presentable and beautiful, I use Figma or Illustrator.

Use what suits your situation best; it doesn’t matter what it is.

After creating your sitemap, the final step is validation and iteration. We want to know that our customers understand our sitemap and flow as well as we do, and depending on the situation there are a few ways to test our sitemaps:

Just to name a few. I will write about these individually in later articles.

I’ve made a video on this topic and I go through the same points but provide a hands-on Sitemap Tutorial using Miro, you can check it out from this YouTube Link:

That’s it for this and I’ll see you in the next one.

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How to Create a UX Sitemap