We put a blunt rule on a lot of our product work. Nothing a user actually came to do should sit more than five taps from where they land. It sounds arbitrary. In practice it's one of the fastest ways to catch an information architecture that's quietly letting people down.
Why five, and why taps
The exact number matters less than picking one. Counting taps makes you honest about the gap between what someone wants and getting it done, a gap that menus, logins, and confirmation screens keep stretching without anyone ever deciding they should.
Taps also carry across devices. A flow that feels fine with a mouse and a big monitor turns into a maze on a phone held one-handed on a weak signal, which is where plenty of your users actually are.
What it changes
We ran this on a healthcare portal once. The tasks patients cared about most, booking, results, messaging, were all buried four or five levels down behind clinical jargon. Pulling them up front and rewriting the labels cut front-desk calls sharply, because patients could finally handle it themselves.
The rule didn't design the portal. It just made the broken parts impossible to ignore, and honestly that's most of the job.