Section 15.1. Destructive Acts of Creation

15.1. Destructive Acts of Creation

What bothers us most about web and intranet redesign projects is the widespread practice of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. ^[*] The site development process moves from strategy to design to implementation. Then, after a period of maintenance often measured in months, not years, someone decides a redesign is required. Perhaps there's a new CEO who wants a "fresh look," or the IT department purchases a content management system. Maybe the User Experience team just gets bored with maintenance.

^[*] Sections of this chapter are drawn from "The Speed of Information Architecture," an article by Peter Morville (http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000003.php).

Whatever the justification, someone commits to a take-no-prisoners redesign that obliterates all elements of the prior site. In the worst cases, an entirely new team is assigned to "do the job right this time," assuring no organizational learning whatsoever.

We're optimistic that we can break out of the infinite loop of destructive creation (Figure 15-1), but first we must better understand and disentangle the currently interwoven layers of information architecture, content, and interface.

Figure 15-1. The infinite loop of destructive creation