Experiencing Information

A few months ago there was an interesting story in Smashing magazine that spotted some new trends in web navigation menus. By and large, the trends identified are seen from a visual design standpoint, including some style trends.

I’ve been noticing two other navigation mechanisms and styles that seem to gaining popularity. The first is what I call a section sitemap menu. This is basically a dynamic menu activitated on roll over or on click from a main navigation point. The layer that is revealed essentially shows a mini-sitemap for that section of the site. This is shallower structure for navigating and allows visitors to get an overview at a glance.

Here are three examples, from HP.com (which has a complete subnavigation in the menu), Philips.nl, and Otto.de (which allows browsing by different facets.

Both the HP.com and Philips.nl examples also integrate advertising and promoting into the navigation. Not sure how user-centered that approach is, but it’s surely a more seductable moment than a plain ad on the homepage. It probably overcomes banner blindness quite well, too.

The second trend I’ve notices is a double-column left-hand navigation area. Blogs sometimes have this. Here’s an example from Information Design Patterns. Or on Josh Porter’s Bokardo.com blog. I know I’ve seen more of this arrangement, but I don’t have more examples at this moment. They’re out there, though.

Let me know if you see any other trends out there.

Garrick Schmitt from Avenue A | Razorfish is giving a presentation at the IA Summit called “Do People Really Use Tag Clouds.” See the description in Summit program or the slides for the presentation on SlideShare.

Seems like much of the presentation is based on a survey they did of 475 Americans about their use of Web 2.0 features and artifacts, like wikis and such. See their Digital Consumer Behavior Study.

The thing that caught my eye was the statistic on use of tab clouds (which gives the presentation its name, obviously). 65% of those surveyed reported never having used a tag cloud, and 23% using them only once in a while. (12% use them more frequently).

Interestingly, those numbers change when asked, Do you find tag clouds helpful? Here, 39% said never, 29% once in a while, 24% most of the time, and 7% all of the time.

This mirrors a claim I made in Designing Web Navigation (Chapter 3):

“As a navigational mechanism, tag clouds seem to have limited value. If a visitor has a known information need, for instance, a cloud of links isn’t really efficient. They seem to be more of a novelty than an effective navigation mechanism. But the visual weighting of links provides valuable information: it shows at a glance what others are talking about or about the concerns of a community. Tag clouds reflect a certain zeitgeist for a site or topic.”

I was glad to come across some data that supports my claim.

I’m giving two all-day workshops on IA and Navigation here in Hamburg in May. The workshops are being organized and sponsored by Karen Lindemann of Netflow. See the details on Netflow’s site (in German only).

Registration is now open. The workshops will be held in German. Dates: 6.-7. May, 2008.

Just came across GoLexa. The interesting thing about this is the search results. They provide quite a bit of context, including links to bookmarking sites, page data, page previews, etc. And there are also plenty of other tools, like direct links to analyze keywords and refine your search.

This brings up the point of the Navigation Layer that I made in my presentation at the Euro IA conference in Barcelona. Navigating the long tail of online information isn’t necessarily about having content or even just finding it. It’s about making sense of it and understanding it. In order to do that, you have to provide structure to both the tools and the content, which is what GoLexa does. There is a lot of hand-crafted IA work on the search results page for GoLexa, even though the content is all dynamically populated.

Check it out–it’s quite interesting.

I wrote a brief summary of my talk at the Euro IA 2007 conference on “Navigating the Long Tail” in the Dec 2007-Jan 2008 issue of the ASIST Bulletin with the same title. See the full article online here. A PDF version is also available.

It doesn’t include all of the points made in the talk, but it gets at the basic jist. Here are a couple of quotes:

“If this new online, long-tail economy is to work, people have to be able to navigate to the markets that interest them and filter the information quickly and efficiently. This is really the value of information architecture (IA). IA not only helps people find the information they need, but it also helps them makes sense of it by providing context.”

“The point is that designing navigation for the long tail calls for any and all types of sources of metadata and all types of structure to provide context. It’s not about one or the other, but about what’s right for the situation. In some situations, a traditional taxonomy may be the best thing; in others, tagging works great. A mix is needed, and those practicing IA will have to experts in them all.”

Marcia Bates has a new, interesting article in Information Research called “What is browsing— really? A model drawing from behavioural science research.” This is an invited paper, and, as the title suggests, it’s a review of empirical research reported in previous studies. Professor Bates is able to draw conclusions based on others’ research and arrive at a model for browsing.

The opening paragraph itself is quite compelling:

“Though often seen as a casual, incidental behaviour in the general society, browsing, in the information world, is widely recognized as an important information seeking technique. In an academic context, scholars have argued that frequent browsing is often the only way to locate information and resources that cannot be readily described by index terms. Further, some kinds of information are recognized as relevant only upon discovery. In short, there are the things you know you do not know and the things you do not know you do not know. Browsing provides an alternative strategy for locating information of the first kind and may provide one of the crucial ways for information of the second kind to be encountered.”

She goes one to review different definitions and models of browsing and concludes that:

“…browsing can be seen to contain four elements, iterated indefinitely, until the overall episode ends:

1. glimpsing a field of vision;
2. selecting or sampling a physical or representational object from the field;
3. examining the object; and
4. physically or conceptually acquiring the examined object, or abandoning it.”

Note that the author herself recognizes that this is visually based, and it omits browsing such things as sound files or the type of browsing a blind person might do while listening to a screen reader. So we have to understand “glimpses” as both visual and auditory–and perhaps even as tactile when considering a Braille reader.

Interestingly enough, Bates pins browsing back to a primal urge all animals have to explore their environment. This recalls Peter Pirolli’s and Stuart Card’s Information Foraging Theory work. Bates writes:

“The in-built motivation for this exploratory behaviour can be called curiosity. Because humans are so strongly reliant on vision, bodily motion often mirrors visual search, in that the second stage of browsing often involves physical movement toward items of interest, which movement, of course, also supports closer visual inspection.”

The last paragraph of the article is disappointing, however:

“The design of interactive information systems needs to incorporate an awareness of human browsing characteristics. Specifically, browsing for information in such systems should not be limited to the opportunity to scan, but instead enable the searcher to manifest the instinctive tendency to engage in a browsing sequence: to glimpse, then to examine or not something glimpsed, then to keep or not the things examined.”

Such vague recommendations for someone who isn’t really in the business of desiging systems always makes me cringe. What does this really mean to any of us who actually design interactive information systems? Not much, I’m afraid.

This article is timely for me, though. I’m scheduled to give a talk at the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart in November on the integration of search and browse. I’ll of course be citing berrypicking material from Bates, but there may be more stuff in this article I can use too. My talk is based directly on Chapter 11 from Designing Web Navigation, where I write:

“From a user’s perspective, navigating and searching aren’t necessarily contrasting activities. People just want to find the information they need. The two aren’t mutually exclusive and really different sides of the same coin. Integrating navigation and search, then, better supports how people really look for information.”

So far, everyone is commenting on the appearance of DWN: the layout, the font, the images, the scannability, etc. Guess the content reviews come later.

But I did get some feedback on the content recently. In particular, some folks from the University College of London Interaction Centre wrote to O’Reilly.

First, here’s what I wrote in DWN:
“The University College of London Interaction Centre hosts a research project that explores the possibility of making all online text interactive—right down to the individual words. Instead of hypertext, the researchers refer to this as Hyperwords. The basic idea is that when a word is clicked, an option menu appears. You can then conduct a search, link to related documents, define the term, translate it, and so on. As they put it, the goal is to put an ‘end to the tyranny of links.’ This would also mean an end to navigation design.”

And they wrote in an email:
“We are very happy to be included in this book, but Hyperwords in no way tries to end navigation design.

Quite the contrary.

Information management and the work of knowledge workers is to continually refine information and re-present it as usefully as possible. Links are fantastic. But they are even more powerful when augmented by other modes of navigation and information work.”

Not sure how I could have misinterpreted putting an “end to the tyranny of links,” but it looks like I did. I mean, how can links be both a tyranny and fantastic at the same time? I guess it’s a fantastic tyranny.

But, enough quibbling with semantics. The example in the book is part of a hypothetical exploration of what navigation is. To show this, I simply wanted to present other models of getting from one piece of information to another, and Hyperwords inspired a whole new way to do that. And, I mention that web navigation is really a system of multiple means of getting around a body of information. So, I think we’re on the same page there.

Thanks for your comment, UCLIC. I’ll be sure to address this correctly in the future.

Looks like DWN is now available on Amazon.com. Also seems to be ready to ship on Amazon.co.uk, but not on Amazon.de. It usually takes longer to make it over to the Continent.

Anyway, rush out not to purchase your copies before they all sell out! (Just kidding - you only need to buy one copy :-).

I started using Daylife just after it first launched. Since then I dropped if from my “Daily Stuff” tabs in FireFox that I usually open simulatenously when I go online. I liked a lot of things about the service, but it just wasn’t something that I needed at the time.
Just having revisited the site, I noticed some major changes to the user experience. The huge, page-filling image that previously occupied the start page has been removed in favor of more genre-conforming elements for online news sites. And for the most part, the site is far less image-rich than before. In areas like “Celebrity” this is unfortunate, but overall it’s probably a good move. With more focus on text and links, Daylife should be able to better expose and leverage their algorithms and entity extraction. And I like the basic information design on the site, so it works well.

A next step for them might be to expose more user-generated content and metadata. Comments, blogging, tagging, etc., would set it apart from other similar news services. (Now, there’s a good quesiton: how can tagging be leveraged on a current awareness service, where articles come on and go off the radar in a matter of days? With no time to incubate a collection of tags, what do you do there?). But their API is already a huge step in the Web 2.0 direction, so I’m going to knock them.

Anyway, I’m going to give it another shot and add it back to my daily tabs.

We’ve had SharePoint at work for over a year now. I’ve heard nothing but complaints from colleagues about how to use it. Sure, it might solve technical problems and allow for some flexibility, but the usability of the system stinks.

I’ve had an unusual thing happen while using it: seems the more I use it, the worse I get at it. I feel I’ve actually un-learned how to use it. Is there such thing as a negative learning curve? If so, Microsoft has figured out how to do it.

I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about how bad it is, particularly the navigation. I’m constantly searching for the right link to click, and often am lead to click the wrong thing. Curiously, most of things you see about SharePoint on the web are about how to implement it, how to customize the CSS, and so forth.

One problem is that it tries to be like Office applications, but it’s web based. Navigating for desktop apps and websites isn’t the same thing. So there seems to be a collision of approaches in SharePoint. Maybe it’s just me, but SharePoint is embarrassingly bad.

After 9 months of writing and 3 months of production, Designing Web Navigation–my first book–is at the printer. There were a few very rough spots with the production, but I think we have most of the kinks worked out.

You can already pre-order it on Amazon.

About The Book:
Since web navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development in some way, the book necessarily paints a broad picture touching on many areas, including things like user research and visual design. But as much as possible the focus throughout remains clearly on creating an effective navigation system. I always try to bring it back home to web navigation whenever the conversation touches other areas.

Thank You:
It’s quite amazing to me how many people contributed to the completion of this book. Here’s a shout out to you all:
- -The primary technical reviewers: Dr. Mark Edwards and Aaron Gustafson.
- -Contributors of the sidebars: Ariane Kempken, my first real mentor in user-centered design, Misha Vaughan, Eric Reiss, Donna Maurer, Victor Lombardi, Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, Luca Rosati, and Mark Edwards.
- -Others who read chapters for me in advance and helped out in other ways: Peter Boersma, Liz Danzico, Jochen Fassbender, Margaret Hanley, Michael Hatscher, Andrea Hill, Theba Islam, Jeff Lash, Victor Lombardi, Ariane Kempken, Michael Kopcsak, Eric Mahleb, Kathryn McDonnell, Donna Maurer, Wolf Nöding Andrew Otwell, Tanya Raybourn, Eric Reiss, Andrea Resmini, Steffen Schilb, Gene Smith, and Joseph Veehoff.