How the product is organised affects everything

Most founders think about screens. The right screens, in the right order, doing the right things.

Underneath all that is something quieter but more important: how the product itself is organised. The way features are grouped. The way pages are named. The way navigation is structured. The way data flows between sections.

This is called information architecture, and it’s the underlying skeleton of the product. When the skeleton is good, users find what they need without thinking. When it’s bad, even pretty individual screens leave users confused — because they can’t form a clear mental model of the whole thing.

You don’t need to be an information architect to handle this well. You do need to take it seriously as a design layer in its own right.

...

Structuring your product so it makes sense (information architecture)