Your documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet Skip to main content June 2026<br>Your documentation is still in your Mum’s filing cabinet

It’s kind of wild when you stop and think about it.

Most documentation is arranged into files, folders and hierarchies. A document goes inside a folder inside another folder and on the surface it’s well tidy. The trouble is that knowledge rarely behaves that way.

A component accessibility decision can affect design, engineering, content and customer support. So where do you put the documentation for it? The more complex the subject, the more awkward that choice becomes.

The modern desktop was developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Early graphical user interfaces borrowed heavily from physical office concepts like documents, folders and filing systems because they were familiar to office workers.

Fifty years later, we’re still using the same mental model. But how many people under 30 have even used a physical filing cabinet?

The filing cabinet we inherited

We rarely stop to consider how much of our digital world is built on this old office metaphor.

I once worked with a guy who saved all his files directly on his Mac desktop. He navigated spatially, placing documents into different zones on the screen and developing a muscle memory for where they were located. I’m not sure he even realised they were saved within a directory structure underneath the desktop folder.

I grew up with the idea of documents inside folders, and as a UX designer, I just expanded on it to create the information architectures of websites.

But imagine if we hadn’t been primed with this tree structure? Maybe more creative and spatial interfaces would have emerged instead.

People don’t browse documentation like librarians

There’s a theory called Information Foraging, which suggests that people follow clues rather than systematically exploring hierarchies.

Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card describe people as information foragers. This is such a rad term for people looking for stuff on the web. Like a badger foraging for small invertebrates, we humans look for signs that useful information might be nearby and constantly decide whether to continue the search.

This may help explain why documentation users often:

search before browsing

stop after exploring a few levels

ask a colleague instead

create duplicate documents

The information often exists, but people don’t instinctively find where it has been stored. It made sense to the person setting up the filing cabinet, but because it’s several drawers down, nestled in with the winter jumpers and hiking socks, it was never to be found. We are all familiar with that team’s Confluence wiki.

Knowledge doesn’t fit into one folder

Circling back to design systems, a component accessibility decision might go in any drawer of the cabinet:

design

engineering

content

accessibility

customer support

But our folder structure forces us to pick one location. The moment we do that, every other route becomes harder.

Researchers have been discussing this limitation for decades. Work on Semantic File Systems in the early 1990s argued that information should be retrievable through attributes and meaning rather than physical location. People usually think about information in terms of topics and tasks, while traditional file systems organise information by location.

AI exposes the problem

Compare this to how AI navigates. Most modern AI retrieval systems don’t rely primarily on folder structures in the way traditional document repositories do.

A design token page can be retrieved because it mentions colour contrast, not because it lives inside:

Design System → Foundations → Accessibility → Colour

The more I work with AI systems, the more obvious it becomes that folders are a storage mechanism, not a knowledge architecture. AI is exposing a problem that humans have been working around for years.

From storage architecture to knowledge architecture

We live in a world of constant context switching. My neurodivergent brain moves continuously between browser tabs, applications, messages and my phone. In that environment, expecting people to remember the one ‘correct’ location for a document feels increasingly unrealistic.

Tree-based organisational structures are so deeply embedded in our tools and workflows that they are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The more useful question is how we make information within those structures easier to find. Rather than relying on a single home for knowledge, we should make it discoverable from multiple directions.

Modern documentation benefits from multiple paths to the same information:

search

metadata

tagging

cross-linking

related content

references

semantic relationships

This idea always brings me back to Chase McCoy’s forward-thinking piece, Design systems as knowledge graphs where he argues that design systems are fundamentally collections of interconnected knowledge rather than sets of isolated...