Iron Mountain's Digital Archive has a clean, professional design that brings tools and documents forward.
Information-management market leader Iron Mountain introduced their web-based digital document storage and retrieval service in early 2002, and invited Filament Group to review the interface's usability. This first engagement evolved into a three-year collaboration in which we've worked with Iron Mountain to design interfaces, develop production-ready front-end code and support integration for more than a dozen rounds of new functionality.
It was a challenging and fun collaboration. As we learned about the power users that work with this tool — customer service telephone reps, archivists, legal researchers who are constantly refining searches and sorting through millions of electronic records for key documents — we continually pushed the boundaries of how web technologies can deliver rich application-like functionality and performance.
Since people use the interface in different ways, we scripted a flexible system of panes that can be resized and collapsed to optimize the workspace for various activities.
The key to delivering application-like performance on the web lay with advanced client-side web coding techniques. For example, we developed custom scripts to allow us to deliver a multi-pane work environment where users could refine and save searches, view results, and preview documents within a flexible workspace. We developed and refined the interaction through a series of prototypes to prove its feasibility and effectiveness. Once our client-side code was tested and delivered to Iron Mountain, we worked on-site as a part of their development team to streamline the complex integration and QA process.
The web application grew and introduced iterative new features and functionality, including broker-dealer supervision for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and structured retention policy management. We were involved throughout this process, from product concept to implementation.
A comprehensive Application Map tracks every screen to mark progress and promote consistency.
Over the years, our familiarity with both the workings of the application and the goals of the company allowed us to help in other ways. For example, we developed two animated demos for sales and marketing teams to highlight the application's unique features — we contributed to the scripts to ensure that key features were highlighted, and crafted the visual design and interactivity to ensure a seamless and consistent brand experience from the demo features to the application itself. And we also developed a comprehensive system diagram that unified the multiple feature launches into a single view of how the overall system works to support the business development and technical teams.