User-centered thinking and empathy (understanding what people are trying to accomplish)
Clear communication and stakeholder management (explaining “why” behind structure decisions)
Systems thinking (designing structures that scale and stay consistent)
Information organization: taxonomies, tagging, and labeling
Navigation and interaction patterns for browsing and discovery
Research methods for IA (card sorting, tree testing, usability testing)
Content modeling (defining content types, fields, and relationships)
Search experience basics (query behavior, filters, relevance signals, handling zero results)
Data-informed decision making (analytics, search logs, support insights)
Prototyping and documentation tools (e.g., Figma, Miro, spreadsheets, wikis)