As with any design element, it is important to review your information architecture design periodically throughout the entire design life cycle, especially during prototyping, with a group of predetermined stakeholders. Even more importantly, you should review the proposed design with sample groupings of the user population that is representative of the business.

After the design is complete and well vetted, it’s time to test-drive the design. A great way to do this is to provide a preselected group of users with an initial pilot experience. Use this time to confirm that their movement through the experience is as they expected. Once this initial pilot is complete, consider providing the pilot to an expanded audience that includes additional, randomly selected users from the business. This is where you can expect to get some of the most valuable feedback because these additional users will be exposed to the system for the first time. Create usage, scenario-based scripts to guide the user and capture valuable feedback.

Once a successful pilot has been completed, it’s time to perform a post-pilot review of the feedback to determine if the design is ready for deployment. If the resulting feedback is overwhelmingly negative, it might be time to consider a design reset. It is far less painful, both economically and psychologically, to go back and re-evaluate the design prior to deployment. If implementation defects are uncovered during the pilot exercise, be sure these issues are addressed before attempting to deploy to end-users. If the resolution of these defects involves any changes in the user experience or if the presence of the defect created a situation where the user was unable to experience the design in its entirety, the pilot should be performed again upon the resolution of these defects.