ASIS&T;
Since 1937, ASIS&T; has been the society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
Information Archaeology — Understanding Historical Design Decisions in Legacy Software
The dark matter of the IA universe can be found in the kinds of internal software tools routinely found within large organisations. Often poorly conceived and implemented, these tools are nonetheless used on daily basis by long suffering employees.
The nature of these tools is often bound up in organisational politics and decision-making in ways that seem incredibly anachronistic when compared to the advances that have been made in the design of consumer software.
An important step for anyone tasked with redesigning internal tools is to understand why they were designed the way they were. IA provides a rich and varied toolkit that can be used to map and identify historical mistakes in the design of legacy tools and avoid the doom of repeating them.
Using case studies of software design projects I've worked on and details of techniques I've found to be effective, I'll demonstrate how IA supports the "archaeological" exploration of legacy tools, revealing how poor decisions manifest themselves in the design of an organisation's tools.
Stuart Curran
Stuart is a UX/strategy guy with a background in information architecture, interface design and project management. He currently works as a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks, the agile software folks. Before that he spent 6 years working in advertising and a further 7 years in web design.
