People mostly use artificial intelligence to do the jobs they didn’t value anyway. But this amounts to cutting our colleagues out. Value must be created through human-to-human exchanges. So we should rapidly focus on uses of AI that go beyond trying to do someone else’s job badly.

Just as human-centred approaches as a whole have suffered from being flattened to a superficial layer, information architecture has suffered its own flattening. Ontology helps us deepen our practice and improve user experience by getting alignment around what we mean.

Just as human-centred approaches as a whole have suffered from being flattened to a superficial layer, information architecture has suffered its own flattening. Ontology helps us deepen our practice and improve user experience by getting alignment around what we mean.

Seeing over the hill

The way we work as human-centred practitioners needs to change. From its beginnings as an engineering technique, through its transition to being a product design tool, user experience now needs to be adopted as a strategic approach.

Some human-centred practitioners have been consigned to increasingly superficial considerations. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.

We have developed a set of ethical personalisation principles to guide our early work to deliver personalised public services. I will present about this work as part of Services Week 2026.

We say “don’t make me think”, and “less is more”. But a naive application of these principles risks limiting our users when we should be helping them grow.

I don’t normally write about music any more, but I feel compelled to write about the new Boards of Canada album, Inferno. It has far exceeded my expectations. I can’t remember the last time I was so immediately hooked on an album — 15 or 20 years ago, or longer.

There was a heavy focus on artificial intelligence. But what really struck me was that the semantic approaches that are preparing us for our AI future are well-established web standards that have been around for decades.

People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions.

People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions.

People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions.

Different ways of working with custom content types in WordPress, and the pros and cons of each.

For the past month, we have been running events showcasing the opportunities of connected content and information architecture. The response to these sessions has far exceeded my expectations.

I am pleased to be involved in organising a series of learning sessions about connected content and information architecture. This series is available to colleagues working in the public sector. The first sessions are this week.

I will be speaking at [World IA Day London 2026]( an online event about information architecture. This is for anyone who works with information or cares about about how it is organised and understood.

Modern artificial intelligence tools are largely rooted in text-based interactions. But the history of user experience, information and even humanity shows us that AI will have to go beyond text if it’s going to become relevant.

Seeing what’s in between as well as what is — in information architecture and in the way organisations work.

For me, 2024 was an extraordinary year of milestone moments and major achievements. It was all overshadowed by one negative event in the summer that I had not received closure on. A year and a half on, I have only just reached something resembling a resolution.

Organisational structures and information architectures are both often visualised in artefacts described as “maps”. These constrained visualisations may embed siloed ways of working, and create problems for our users.

A usable product starts with the conceptual model, but designers have "optimized" that work out of the profession. It's time to bring it back.

Recently I had to intensively research a couple of topics involving potential purchase decisions. My experience was utterly miserable.

The ideas behind agile tend to be squashed down to two words: “move fast”. But the Agile Manifesto says nothing about moving fast.

The ideas behind agile tend to be squashed down to two words: “move fast”. But the Agile Manifesto says nothing about moving fast.

I have had to make some behind-the-scenes changes to this website. In the process, I am planning to make it more interoperable with the fediverse and indieweb standards — and I am sticking with WordPress.

The folder metaphor so intuitive to generations of computer users that they can struggle to think of any other way of using a computer. Yet for younger generations, the idea is completely alien.

One of the most powerful methods in information architecture and user experience is also one of the least well-known. The top tasks method uses a single survey question that tells you exactly what matters most to your users. I find it so effective that I’m amazed more people haven’t used it.

Information architecture normally focuses on the objects that need to be represented in a system. Some human-centred practitioners focus instead on the tasks users need to do. These approaches are sometimes framed in opposition. But combining these techniques can make services and systems easier to use as well as more efficient to manage.

Amid technology-focused hype cycles, the job of human-centred practitioners is to remind everyone: the main reason people use technology is to enhance our connections with other humans in the real world.

I have long felt uneasy about modern occupations associating themselves with high-status traditional professions. This has been brought into sharp focus for me since I started a role last year focusing heavily on information architecture, to the annoyance of my wife Alex, who is an actual architect.

I have long felt uneasy about modern occupations associating themselves with high-status traditional professions. This has been brought into sharp focus for me since I started a role last year focusing heavily on information architecture, to the annoyance of my wife Alex, who is an actual architect.

There are several benefits of building a content model in an object-oriented way. This post walks through those benefits, and demonstrates a real-life example of how this approach works on a well-know...

Decades-old approaches are being brought up to date with new techniques to create a robust way of structuring content to enable reuse and make content management more efficient.

In my job at the Scottish Government, we are understanding the opportunities that can be provided by following an object-oriented approach to structuring our information.

Information has become the forgotten half in “information technology”. Tech companies are struggling because they aren’t focusing on the human problems they need to solve.

I was sad to learn earlier that ( Vicky had been a designer for a few different government departments and public sector organisations. I didn't know her well. But I have read her blog posts for years, and I was delighted to encounter her in meetings about structured information since I joined the civil service a few months ago. I was struck by how she demonstrated both fresh thinking and wisdom.

A perspective on the similarities and differences between information, data, content and knowledge.

A perspective on the similarities and differences between information, data, content and knowledge.

I found some very vintage but surprisingly pristine litter in Morningside a few weeks ago.

Human-centred decisions

I have long been an advocate of agile ways of working. One of the things that originally drew me to user experience was the opportunity to have evidence-based ways of understanding the changes you nee...

Now that I am living and working in Edinburgh, I have decided to take up cycling. Unfortunately, I have already managed to injure myself on my bike.