Month: October 2003

Andrew Dillon’s work on digital genres, the web, and the shape of information is some of the most exciting research I’ve come across in the field of navigation. He has investigated how we can use our familiarity with genres to navigate, how navigation of information is different than navigation in physical space, and that creating navigation is essentially about creating meaning, not just road signs. And he manages to do this while retaining essentially a top-down perspective, not succumbing to a focus on merely organizing content. He doesn’t go as far as addressing larger user experience issues head on, but he positions his work in a way that acknowledges those issues.

If you have access to JASIS past issues, a good starting point is Spatial-Semantics: How Users Derive Shape from Information Space (JASIS. 51(6):521­528, 2000). Otherwise download “It’s the journey and the destination” (PDF) where he questions the difference between navigation and content… ‘while physical navigation might be neatly divorced from the purpose of the journey, interactions with digital documents are not so easily divided. The purpose of moving though the information space is frequently the same purpose as the journey, to reach an end point of comprehension – and in this case the journey is the destination.’

Here’s my short form raw notes, which aren’t necessarily helpful to anyone else until I do something with them…

• Don’t misapply navigation from the physical domain to the semantic domain


• User’s perceive “global” schemata (generally how sites work) and “instantiated” schemata (how this particular site works). This can be apply to ideas of design conventions.


• The structure of a genre – the shape – is a global schemata. Users can predict ordering and grouping of elements. They know where a typical element belongs in the overall structure.


• Examples of genres online might be articles, blog postings, email headers…


• Need to leverage existing shape, and fit information into existing genres when possible.


• Cites research (Snowberry et al) that menu navigation has (basically) bad scent. So these ideas are helpful when categories don’t work due to unfamiliarity with the domain.


• Recognition of genre depends on experience and expertise of that genre. Integrate these attributes into user models.


• Upon entering a new location, users will identify unique spatial configurations (Siegal and White, Mandles). Immediately after, semantic processing begins.


• Shape is a property conveyed both by physical form and by information cotent


• “Technology is more malleable that the user” – Amen!


• Contrast expertise with differences in cognition (spatial ability or memory span). Also needs to be integrated into user models.


• Disorientation occurs when short term memory (STM) is overloaded (by lack of good navigation)


• Genre could be based on how a community uses information and varies by culture. Another attribute for user model.

If I were to edit a historical collection of essays on information architecture, it would have to include George Furnas‘ Effective View Navigation (PDF). Published in 1997 and borrowing from earlier work that harks back to ’95, it is not to be read for new methods of navigation. It does however provide serious analysis of a fundamental information architecture challenge, ‘despite the vastness of an information structure, the views must be small, moving around must not take too many steps and the route to any target be must be discoverable.’ His focus is on what to do in that small view (i.e. a page, or a viewport of a page) including ideas that form the basis of information scent.

For serious information architects, EVN is a must read. At eight ACM-style pages it’s not long but it is dense, requiring me to double-back often. His initial discussion of Efficient View Traversibility sets aside the user experience perspective in favor of graph theory and so can be a dense read to the practitioner, but it is necessary to his later arguments which are worth understanding.

Here come the spoilers: after an interesting logical analysis of the problem he concedes that one navigation scheme – what we might call global navigation today – would be hard-pressed to provide access to a large information structure. Along the way he predicts the rise of a combination of global and local navigation.

His ideas of efficient view traversibility provide (in my interpretation) a good mathematical explanation of creating short paths to target information and a helpful last resort after other methods fail, ‘always remember the strategy of putting a traversable infrastructure on an otherwise unruly information structure!‘ For example, as a last resort, stuff the information into a balanced tree. If we combine this with a user-centered design method, we might say, ‘If research of the users does not reveal a clear path to the information, and the users understand the domain enough to understand the meaning of a set of hierarchical categories, then stuff the information into a balanced tree.’ Other conclusions of his, combined with a design process, can yield a more systematic design method than what we have now (which is why I’m trudging through this stuff).

His use of navigation requirements nicely frames his discussion, for example, ‘Every node must have good residue at every other node.‘ We rarely have such strict requirements in our designs, but the practice of using navigation requirements – falling somewhere between scenarios and screen designs – helps increase the likelihood of creating successful navigation.

His setting aside of user experience considerations at times seems unworkable; the goal of efficiency can be at odds with what may be cognitively effective with users. But the thoughtful designer can factor that into the use of his ideas.