Modern organizations build structures of informations, environments, that might as well be places or even cities in their own right. These invisible infrastructures dictate so much about what is actually happening within a product or service offering, how it works, and how users perceive it based on its structure. The difference between this unseen underlying structure and what is expressed in interfaces and touchpoints is a major contributor to user confusion and usability breakdowns.

"Seeing" this layer—being able to conceptualize, visualize, and roughly understand its implications on experience outcomes and capabilities—is a skill that gives us clarity in our ability to identify design problems, and a real and active sense of possibility, of what's feasible and where the "hard constraints" of our offering really are.

This skill is not [necessarily] about having a deep technical understanding of a given service. It's about the broad conceptual understanding of what constitutes a service, and a more specific conceptual understanding of the informaiton environment within the services we're currently acting on.