Designing Navigable Information Spaces
http://www.infoarch.ai.mit.edu/
The State of the Web (or the contents of your home directory)
- Opportunistic growth and organization
- Hard to navigate:
- Overviews
- Where you’ve been
- Where you’re going
The Vision
What if navigating in an information space were as easy as navigating in a physical space?
- Users should not feel lost.
- Users should be able to make correct navigation decisions.
- Users should get an overview of the space.
Navigability by design
- Want to find organizing principles for navigable information spaces.
- Real-world navigability is the product of design.
Contributions
- A study of what makes physical places (like cities and museum exhibits) navigable.
- From that study, organizing principles for navigable information spaces.
- Not necessarily novel, but effective in practice.
- Examples of information spaces illustrating those principles.
What is an information space? An Example
The JAIR information space: navigation is journal browsing
Architecture versus Presentation
Navigating in the real world
We use affordances in the environment.
Distinctive features of Boston (Lynch, 1960)
Mental Maps
We remember how to navigate using those affordances.
Features recalled by Lynch’s subjects in sketch maps (Lynch, 1960)
Landmarks indicate important locations
- Salient (visual prominence)
- Cue for relative orientation
Well-structured paths keep the user oriented
- Introduction, middle, and conclusion
- Sense of progress and distance
- Building numbers on streets
- Boston: buildings and numbers uncorrelated
- Tokyo: numbers assigned chronologically
Maps give the user an overview
Holocaust museum, first floor
Signs help in making navigation decisions
- Using a small amount of information to direct the user toward a larger amount
- Decision points are landmarks
- A route is a sequence of decision points
Educational Museum Exhibits
Designed to communicate by navigating a physical space
- Interviews with designers
- Collection of primary design documents
Present messages in a hierarchy
Paths follow an evolving attribute
Particularly time: a historical view
Order concepts to facilitate understanding
Permit multiple levels of engagement
Walt Disney’s Wienies
- Keep the user moving along that path
- Walt Disney insisted they be used throughout his amusement parks (McLean 1993)
Design goals for Course VI
Course VI: Overview Map
Course VI: Immersive, 3D space
Course VI Information Architecture
Eero
- 2D visualization library
- multiscale (Pad++, Bederson 1994)
- Surveyor parses semi-structured information sources
- Courier, a shared object database & messaging service
Explore the information space design space
Expert-assisted design
- A design methodology for information spaces
- What else do we need to know to create a competent assistant?
- Modeling the task: search, browsing, touring
- Modeling the domain
- Modeling the user
- Applying the principles
Related Work
- Furnas: Efficient View Traversibility and Efficient View Navigability (1997)
- Lokuge, Gilbert, and Richards: Structuring information with mental models (1996)
- Chalmers, Ingram, and Franger: Augmenting visualizations with imageability features (1996)
Summary
- A study of what makes physical places (like cities and museum exhibits) navigable.
- From that study, organizing principles for navigable information spaces.
- Examples of information spaces illustrating those principles.
- Eero: making the principles operational.
Evaluation is difficult.
Evaluation is for redesign. But:
- Can an a space diagnose itself?
Where does the user get lost?
Memorable introduction and conclusion
Communicate in multiple ways
Regions aggregate related material
Multiscale interface
User pans and zooms rapidly over a 2D space. Objects in the space are displayed at varying levels of detail.
Surveyor
- parses semi-structured information sources with rules
- rules form an augmented transition network with regular expressions on arcs
- matched regular expressions instantiate schema
Courier: Distributed object infrastructure
This Talk
Landmarks: introduction and conclusion
Landmarks: important slides
What is a design principle?
- Sufficient, not necessary
A way to design an artifact to meet a requirement