Files, email and the problem of finding something again

The FoundIt Tour: A Record of an Interface

This address previously hosted the FoundIt product tour. A 2007 comment by Anjali on UXmatters links directly to it while discussing the tool her team had designed. It is a first-person project reference, not an endorsement by the author of the UXmatters article.

The archived tour belongs to an earlier desktop-search environment. It concerns locating files and email and organising personal information around an extension of Google Desktop. The surrounding project pages refer to operating systems and browsers of that period.

A tour is more than a list of features. It proposes a model of the person using the product: what they remember, what they have forgotten, and which decisions they are prepared to make. Reading an older tour can reveal that model even when the application itself is unavailable.

A useful comparison separates the task from its implementation. The task might be finding a message connected to a project. The particular interface used to perform it is historically situated. That distinction allows a design question to remain useful without treating obsolete software as a current recommendation.

This is an editorial record of the tour. The original application is not running here, and no contemporary support or restored executable is implied. Consult the historical tour for the original sequence and the main FoundIt record for context.