Deliver Products and Digital Places that are Good for People
Powered by Information Architecture
In the digital age, good experiences rely on making the complex clear.
The Understanding Group (TUG) delivers clarity through a proven process for planning and designing products and digital places that delight the people that use them. Since 2011, our information architects have worked with over 100 companies, from small non-profits to the Fortune 5, helping their teams deliver apps, websites, portals, and physical products that are easy-to-navigate and resilient over time.
What We Do
STRATEGY
Making The Complex Clear
Confusion is costly, and a clear strategy and plan has never been more important. We help you cut through the fog of complexity and align your team behind a coherent charter for your digital places and AI strategy.
Research
Clarifying Your World
Learn what it takes to meet the needs of your users through research. Gain insight through models and align your whole organization around a shared understanding of the people you serve.
Design
Creating a Sense of Place
Delight your visitors with digital places where they always know where to go and how to do what they came to do through well-designed structure and navigation.
Education
Seeing Like an Architect
Bring the power of information architecture to your organization with workshops that help you make the complex clear. Applicable for anyone who works with complexity, from designers to senior executives.
Amplify Your Mission with AI
TUG guides mission-driven organizations in harnessing AI's power through a people-centric approach:
Learn: Empower your team with AI literacy focused on human needs and ethical considerations
Deploy: Integrate AI solutions that amplify your people's capabilities, not replace them
Scale: Expand your impact by aligning AI with your processes, values, and human expertise
We make the complex clear, ensuring AI serves your mission and your people. With TUG, AI follows what people want to achieve—not the other way around.
Solving Problems in Terms of Architecture
Complex systems require careful planning. They are the result of a myriad of decisions and trade-offs, and the rapid integration of AI technologies only amplifies these complexities. Whether intentional or not, all your systems have an inherent information architecture but often lack coherence. We help you bring clarity to your digital places by collaborating with stakeholders to architect digital places that are not only beautifully designed but also resilient and purposeful. Through our information architecture-centered process, we create the right models at the right time to help teams align every step of the way. The result is a coherent and consistent way to talk about and organize your digital world.
Architecting Places Made of Information
Your digital places may run on technology, but people experience them as places made of information. You know where you can go and what to do based on systems of information—menus, lists, and labels positioned on the screen as signposts that guide your movement through a digital place. We help you design the foundational structure to support good user experience with systems of language and navigational structures to provide a resilient, useful, and enjoyable experience for users. Since 2011, we have successfully designed digital places for over a hundred companies, ranging in size from small nonprofits to the Fortune 500.
People Empowering People to Make the Complex Clear
We’ve built a team of experienced strategists, designers, analysts, researchers, and information architects who love to evaluate, architect, and design complex digital places that are good for people. TUG is about people empowering people to serve other people. It’s all about people, as reflected in the “Pace Layers” diagram of TUG’s core guiding principles. As your partner, we bring a team where everyone is treated as a principal, and the ultimate measure of success is how well we honor others with our actions and words.
TUG’s “Pace Layers”
Get in Touch with TUG Today
Please contact us to send a message or schedule an appointment to talk at your convenience. We look forward to hearing about your complex problem and helping you find a way to solve it.