Why your website's organization makes sense to you but confuses everyone else
Published April 9, 2026 • 3 minute read
By Austin Govella, digital strategist (and former information architect)
Since 1998, Austin has applied his information architecture skills for organizations big and small all across the globe. He co-authored Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web, 2nd edition with Christina Wodtke.
Key takeaway: How you think about the stuff in your site isn’t how your users think about the stuff. If you want your site to work for your users, you have to design a site that reflects how they think.
If you have a product or a website or a service that you built, of course everything makes sense to you. You built it. But your users didn't build it, and what makes sense to you won't make sense to your users.
This explains why users can't find things in your system.
Why you assume your users think like you
The curse of knowledge strikes when you know something, and you assume everyone else knows the same thing. The curse of knowledge affects a lot of websites and applications because the people who build them know how they organized the sites and apps, so they assume end users understand the same thing.
But end users don't know or understand how you organized your product. They only know what they expect to find, and what your users expect and what you build rarely represent the same thing.
The org chart problem
Organizations will organize their websites to mirror their company's org chart. Each department gets a section on the site. You might see this on a University site organized by departments instead of by student task.
This happens with products, too, with each engineering or product team getting a different area of the product.
You'll notice this on e-commerce websites that use internal product codes as categories instead of organizing products to match how customers shop.
If you work for any of these groups, the way they organize their sites and features and products makes sense because you work inside the organization. You know how they organize things. But your end users don't work inside your org, and they don't know how you organize things.
When you build digital spaces based on how you think, you design from the inside-out. That's the curse of knowledge. To create effective digital products, you need to build from the out-side in, from your user's perspective.
Shifting from Inside-Out to Outside-In
When you work from the inside-out, when you design, you start with what you need and what you know about your organization and design from there. Outside-in flips the approach: you start from what your users know and what your users need when you start to design.
This brings us to our definition of information architecture: making sense of things, so they make sense for other people.
So you still ask the four questions:
What stuff do we have?
How can we organize this stuff?
What can we call this stuff?
How is this stuff related?
But you ask each question in terms of your end user:
What stuff do we have, that our users need?
How can we organize this stuff, so our users can find things?
What can we call this stuff, so our users understand?
How is this stuff related, so our users can navigate?
To answer these four questions, you need four things. Start with a list of user tasks, the things they want to do with your product or site. Combine this with an understanding of the user's overall goal. Finally, you'll need to uncover how users talk about and describe things. What language do they use?
You can use research activities like stakeholder and user interviews, ethnography, and card sorting to understand how your users think. The information you gather from these research inputs helps you answer the four questions from the end user's perspective.
Research methods (covered in a future post) provide the raw material. For now, the important thing to remember: you want to understand how your user thinks about all the stuff you have in your product, app, or site.
How your user thinks about all the stuff is called the user's mental model. Your mental model represents your inside-out thinking. The user's mental model represents outside-in thinking. The different mental models explain why we struggle to overcome the curse of knowledge.