Navigation/Wayfinding
Alex Wright gave a talk based on his book down at Google and it’s probably the longest video I’ve ever watched with full attention start to finish on the web. The Web That Wasn’t is an accessible and inspiring series of biographical sketches of historical visionaries of the web and web-like constructions. Alex describes the visions and significance of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and others who foresaw the current www (and more) over the past 100+ years. And, in so doing, he points out the ways the current web falls short of their various visions as well as describing the gestures in the current incarnation towards such things as two-way links, and visible trails through hypertext. Well done, Alex.
I think there’s something a little bit queer about the SFGate navigation schema:
You’ve surely seen pics of the outside of the new Seattle Public Library, but wow, the inside looks amazing. Wayfinding is a big issue in libraries, and not having been there I can’t say how well the SPL has done, but there’s no question what section this is or what you do here.
Pie Menu Central is just that. (via christina via email)
Signs, signs, everywhere signs… Caltrans Bloopers & Oddities Page (district 4). And even better… Caltrans sign specs and Federal highway sign info. And, perhaps best of all: Traffic Engineer (is that kinda like an Information Architect?) Richard C. Moeur’s Manual of Traffic Signs.
The idea of hobo signs (see below) suggests a location-aware wireless application: I’m sure someone’s already doing this, but I’d love to see location-based public message boards (e.g. restaurant reviews or “to catch a cab, better go down the block”). Because the thing that’s so cool about hobo signs is that it’s user-created wayfinding/metadata. It’s a public layering of information space on physical space.
Hobo signs!
Wow! is all I can say.. visual symbols for things like “Can sleep in barn” (my favorite) and “You’ll get cursed out here.”
It definitely means something that articles on scent and web navigation are appearing in mainstream publications (if you can call the economist that). Bonus points because one of the researchers is named Dr. CHI.
ps—here’s the paper itself—The Scent of a Site (pdf)—which I’ve probably logged before.
So, just to prove the web is all about connections, I was checking out this article (about links) called No weak links (which is worth perusing) and I thought hey, this is worth perusing. Then as I scrolled down, I saw a screenshot from Webmonkey (where I used to work) and that was cool. Then I looked closer and saw that it was of an article I’d written and my face was on it (hee hee). And then I remembered that Wendy (my wife and partner in design) had taken the picture. (link via xblog)
Check out the latest Osil8—Press Nothing to Continue—for a demo of TellMe studio (coupled with Blogger). Now you, too, can have a voice portal.
Heh, there’s also a VXML version of Adventure: #75844. “You are wandering aimlessly through the forest.”
There’s something undeniably appealing about talking to a computer. I’m glad TellMe has opened it up; it’ll be interesting to see what uses the street finds for this technology (other than porn and warez, that is).
A little while back, peter reminded me of information foraging theory and linked to the PARC Information Foraging page. There’s definitely something about the theory that rings true, although I find myself using it mostly as a design heuristic, where I compare the relative strength of “scents” of various links on a page and then adjust them according to the relative importance of those pages. Heh, of course that could be because I’m not a Psychological Anthropologist or somesuch.
Red sent me a link to this page where Amazon explains its navigation. Guys, I really think user feedback needs to come a little earlier in the process. (translation: what are you thinking? If you had been testing your design all along, you’d come up with something that doesn’t need a whole page devoted to explaining how it works.)
On the SIG-IA list a while back, some interesting (if “nit-picky”) comparison of wayfinding and navigation: one, two, three, four.
FEED on the semiotics of color in pedestrian warning signs (or something like that). I love FEED mag.
Vincent is back: I had seen human factors international before and ignored it, but there’s some good stuff there, like 10 Web usability tips. He also pointed to Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation…, which appears to be useful, although I’m not sure I agree that “Every Web Site Needs a Detailed Table of Contents” (obviously I wasn’t able to navigate this rapidly enough to figure out if it was worth reading ;)
Here’s a whole lot of thinkin’ about Designing Navigable Information Spaces. I found it on this MIT information architecture site (via Info Design)
Vincent also links to this paper on hypermedia navigation, which looks worth reading.
From uidesign.net, a proposal to the W3C: XML Document Navigation Language outlines a syntax for marking up data for navigation within a document (for teeny-tiny screens like cellphones and butter dishes). As the uidesign review of XDNL points out, this may work for static documents, but not as well for applications. (I also think we probably ought to avoid designing all our content-delivery tools for the crappy displays on today’s cellphones).
I think a big part of the trouble is that we’re trying to organize all types of data (including applications) in terms of documents. It’s that same old the-web-was-designed-for-physics-papers problem.
On the web, navigation—finding your way around—is one of the Big Problems. Here’s a discussion of task-specific wayfinding maps, with an eye to figuring out how best to guide people from place to place. Definitely applicable to the web. (courtesy of InfoDesign).
Information Seeking on the Web offers a pretty formal, 2-dimensional model of the ways people look for info on the Web. On one hand, the different search modes suggest different (though not necessarily contradictory) design objectives. On the other hand, I keep thinking that the most important “usability” factor is the quality of the information.