Duncan Stephen

Article — 1 November 2025 — 797 words

How did we let the web get this bad?

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

Article — 2 October 2025 — 555 words

The forgotten purpose of agile — Empowered teams responding to change

Business — Technology

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

Article — 26 September 2025 — 1,247 words

Autonomy, independence, federation, WordPress and concrete

Personal — Web

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.

Article — 11 August 2025 — 1,745 words

Life beyond the folder system

Digital — Information architecture — Technology — Web

The folder metaphor is 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.

Article — 17 July 2025 — 1,715 words

Top tasks survey — One weird trick to improve information architecture and user experience

Information architecture — User experience

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.

Article — 26 June 2025 — 1,082 words

Services are verbs combined with nouns

Information architecture — Service design

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.

Article — 2 May 2025 — 1,271 words

Keeping it real in the age of artificial intelligence

Society — Technology

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.

Article — 9 April 2025 — 2,620 words

The pain in a name — Is information architecture right to call itself architecture?

Architecture — Information architecture — Technology — User experience

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.

Article — 25 February 2025 — 1,679 words

Object-oriented approaches in action

Information architecture — User experience — Web — Work

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-known website.

Article — 17 February 2025 — 1,012 words

How we are following an object-oriented approach to structuring information

Information architecture — User experience — Work

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.

Article — 10 February 2025 — 801 words

The object of information architecture

Information architecture — Parenting — Social science — User experience — Work

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.

Article — 4 February 2025 — 1,406 words

There’s no such thing as a technology problem

Business — Social science — Society — Technology — Web

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.