Information Architecture — How Palash Sarkar Organizes Complex Products

Palash Sarkar has redesigned products, like SquaredFinancial's trading app, where the core usability problem had almost nothing to do with visual polish — it was information architecture. Users couldn't find what they needed because the underlying structure of the product didn't match how they actually thought about their own tasks.

Structure Before Screens

Information architecture — how content and features are grouped, labeled, and navigated — gets decided before any visual design begins. Palash Sarkar builds sitemaps and navigation structures as their own dedicated step, tested against real user tasks, rather than letting structure emerge accidentally from whatever order screens happen to get designed in.

Card Sorting Reveals How Users Actually Categorize Things

Designers and users frequently categorize information differently — a grouping that seems obvious internally can be genuinely confusing to a first-time user. Card sorting exercises, where users group content into categories that make sense to them, regularly surface structural assumptions worth challenging before they get built into a product's permanent navigation.

Labeling Is Structure, Not Decoration

A menu item's label carries real structural weight — "Portfolio" and "Positions" might refer to the same feature internally, but only one will make sense to the actual user base of a given product. Palash Sarkar treats labeling decisions as an information architecture problem worth real research, not a late-stage copywriting detail.

Key Takeaways

Complex products succeed or fail on their underlying structure more than their visual polish. Palash Sarkar's information architecture discipline — sitemaps before screens, card sorting to validate categorization, and labeling treated as structural — is what makes dense products like trading platforms and dashboards genuinely navigable.