Designing products shaped by history

Thomson Reuters develops information services used by legal and tax professionals around the world. I worked across several of its products, helping improve how customers discovered and navigated complex legal information.

My work centred on search, navigation and information architecture across products including Westlaw, Lawtel and IDS.

As I became more familiar with the products, one thing became increasingly apparent. Many of the decisions shaping the user experience had been made years earlier for a very different context.

One example has stayed with me.

Some of the legal content had originally been structured for print, with information stored as individual paragraphs ready for publishing. Years later, when the team came to improve search, that historical structure still influenced how people thought about the problem.

Search results showed a single paragraph at a time because that’s how the content had always existed.

It was a reminder that products don’t start from a blank sheet of paper. They’re shaped by the decisions, technologies and assumptions that came before them.

Curious how experiences like this have shaped my approach?

Working on products like these reinforced the importance of understanding how something came to be before deciding how it should change. Many of the principles I follow today have been shaped by seeing how yesterday’s decisions continue to influence today’s products.