Mapping organizations to design better websites

Most web projects start with a wireframe or a sitemap. I sometimes take a step back before that. On complex projects, especially those involving multi-service organizations or businesses with several distinct audiences, I build an ecosystem map first.

What services do they offer? How do they fund themselves? What happens before someone arrives on the site, and what happens after? Which interactions currently happen elsewhere and could be simplified through the digital experience?

The map is not a flowchart and it is not a sitemap. It is a shared understanding document. It aligns the team, helps the client see their own organization more clearly, and gives every design decision that follows a stronger foundation.

CIRA is Canada's internet registry, originally built around .CA domain names. Over time, it expanded into cybersecurity products, community investment programs, DNS infrastructure, and more. By the time we started the project, the site was carrying six distinct business units under one navigation, and no one could find anything.

Before touching the architecture, I conducted interviews with each of the six business units. Each interview surfaced the unit's objectives, its pain points with the current site, and the role the website was expected to play in their work.

The ecosystem map translated those six conversations into a single visual that showed how each unit functioned, what it needed to communicate, and how it connected to the others. It became the shared reference point for every information architecture decision that followed: how to restructure the navigation, which content to prioritize, where overlap existed between divisions, and where the site could simplify the experience for users who had no idea CIRA was six organizations in one.

Randolph is a board game brand built around a network of playful bars across Quebec, where people discover games, rent them on-site, and buy them to bring home. The e-commerce site is one part of a much larger service model: the bars are the discovery engine, the website is where the purchase happens, and the two needed to work together.

Before designing the online store, I mapped how the full Randolph experience worked. What happens in the bar? How does someone go from playing a game at a table to finding it on the website? Where does the current site create friction in that journey? What role do the in-bar recommendations play, and how could the site replicate or extend that guidance digitally?

The ecosystem map made the e-commerce problem much clearer. The challenge was not just to sell games online. It was to translate the human, guided experience of the bar into a digital journey that could stand on its own. That reframing shaped the product discovery model, the navigation logic, and the way the site communicated the Randolph universe to someone who had never visited a location.

Maison Simonne-Monet-Chartrand is a shelter and community organization supporting women and children affected by domestic violence. From the outside, it looks like a single organization with a single mission. From the inside, it operates as three interconnected systems that each needed to be understood before we could design a site that served all of them

The map guided our design to integrate all functions without overlap. It served as a digital entry for victims, a content hub for awareness, a donation gateway for funders, and a visibility tool for SOS Violence Conjugale, ensuring clarity for each audience.

Understanding the full map made it possible to design an architecture that respected those distinctions without making the site feel fractured.