In my daily practice as information architect working for clients on the structure and design of pages for websites, intranets and application, one of the recurring challenges is to have a client team make choices in selecting the right content to display on a page, prioritizing the content (what comes first on the page), linking the page content in a meaningful way to other content, and adding the right call to actions (CTA’s) to the page. Of course, this problem is not new. In the past 10 to 15 years, a range of models/tools have emerged to help you tackle this: Page description diagrams, the Core model, Priority guides, OOUX, Page tables, the Container model…. basically, they are all about listing the content and CTA’s needed on a page and prioritizing them in a mobile-first way. These different models/tools do very similar things but not exactly the same, so which one should you choose?

 In the past years, I have been trying out these different models and used them in different projects. I have discovered for instance that priority guides work really well when you want to include actual content and want to leave out the design/wireframing aspect completely. Cores & paths are great to start with early on in a project, can be applied in almost every situation, even when you don’t have a classification for your site yet, but go less in depth and lack the prioritization element. OOUX is great for its practical, workshop-friendly step-by-step sticky notes process and the idea of “nested objects”. In this talk I will share these findings, show examples from projects, explain the pros and cons of each tool/model, and guide you in making the right choice of tools depending on the context. I will even show you how you can combine elements of different tools into your own version of them.