BRANDEE DUDENHOEFEr
CONTENT DESIGNER | SILLY GOOSE
Reframing what "Patterns" actually meant
How challenging an accepted research conclusion shifted the team from a label swap to a mental-model problem.
ROLE
Staff Content Designer, IA strategy partner
TIMELINE
2023–2024
FOCUS
Research synthesis · IA · Navigation · Terminology
THE CHALLENGE
The team had already decided the word was the problem
Prior research had concluded that users didn't understand "Patterns," and the team was moving toward "Flows" as the replacement.
Before that shipped, a closer look at the original card sort, usability studies, and participant quotes surfaced something the label swap didn't explain.
THE REFRAME
The question on the table was "do users understand the label Patterns?" The reframe: how do users actually understand the relationship between reusable components, repeatable interaction patterns, and end-to-end task flows?
If Patterns and Flows represented different levels of the system, replacing one with the other could remove a piece of the architecture users needed.
THE CONTRADICTION
What users said didn't match what they did.
Participants described Patterns as confusing — but in the same sessions, they grouped related content correctly, navigated there for multi-step guidance, and asked for more of it. A closed card sort with limited definitions had captured confusion about a word. It hadn't proven the concept needed to go.
WHAT USERS SAID
"Patterns is confusing."
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Low agreement in the original closed card sort
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Struggled to define the category when asked directly
WHAT USERS DID
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Grouped related concepts into Patterns correctly
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Navigated there specifically for multi-step guidance
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Asked for more patterns, not fewer
THE APPROACH
Tested the mental model, not the label.
Treated the three concepts as layers, not competitors
Modeled Components (reusable elements), Patterns (elements working together to solve a repeatable interaction problem), and Flows (broader task sequences) as potentially distinct but related — instead of assuming one had to replace another.
Ran a validation round built to test the model, not the word
Ten participants — five designers, five developers — through interviews and usability testing across live and Figma prototypes, examining categorization and expectations directly rather than asking for label preference.
Separated findings from interpretation
Traced the original confusion back to test conditions — a closed card sort, limited definitions, mixed professional vocabulary across designers, engineers, and stakeholders — rather than treating "users are confused" as a settled fact.
WHAT CHANGED
The conversation moved from wording to architecture.
BEFORE
"Which term should we use?"
AFTER
"What conceptual levels does the system need, and how should they relate?"
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Prevented an unproven interpretation from being adopted as established user truth
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Identified that Patterns and Flows had not actually been validated as substitutes for each other
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Created a stronger, evidence-backed hypothesis for how the system's IA should work going forward
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FUTURE-READY
The same clarity that fixed navigation kept AI output consistent.
Components, Patterns, and Flows only work as separate concepts if each has a clean, non-overlapping definition — the same requirement generative AI needs to produce consistent output.
When VPDS guidance was later exposed through MCP, a Pattern request mapped to a Pattern, a Flow request to a Flow — no ambiguity for a model to inherit from a taxonomy that could easily have been collapsed to resolve a labeling complaint.
RELATED CASE STUDY
How this research fed into the content architecture and public launch of VPDS.
