The Core Model
Invented by Are Halland in 2006, introduced at the IA Summit in 2007, and popularized by Ida Aalen’s 2015 A List Apart article. A pen-and-paper workshop method that identifies your core pages, the places where top user tasks and business goals overlap, then designs each one from the inside out: inward paths (how people actually arrive: search, social, links, not the homepage) and forward paths (where the page should send them next). It is the purest "decide what the content must do to hit organizational goals" tool in the field, and it deliberately postpones the homepage debate.
Finds the pages where user tasks and business goals overlap, then designs paths in and out.
User tasks × business goals = the core → inward paths → forward paths
When to use this
- When a redesign starts with executives arguing about the homepage, the core model redirects energy to the pages that do the work.
- As a cross-functional workshop, it aligns stakeholders around user tasks and business goals on one sheet of paper.
- When analytics show traffic landing deep in the site and dead-ending, forward paths are the fix.