Chris Dent
L505 Essay Session 2
2001-01-19
Finding Proximity in the Web
In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web authors Rosenfeld
and Morville suggest the “foundation of almost all good information
architectures is a well-designed hierarchy.” (p. 37) Elsewhere in the same
chapter they state “ambiguous organization supports [a] serendipitous mode of
information seeking by grouping items in intellectually meaningful ways.” (p.
30) How, in the creation of an information resource, can we impose the excluding,
exacting and tree-like structure of hierarchy—group things according to both
intellectually constructed differences such as “about cats” as well as less
subjective differences such as “title begins with the letter ‘c’”—while still
allowing for multiple dimensions of serendipitous discovery?
The simple example of this
kind of discovery is browsing in a library. A researcher goes to the catalog,
finds a reference for a book and heads to the stacks. In the stacks s/he finds
the originally desired book but it proves boring. Next to the original book,
however, are several other potentially good books, of the same or a related
subject.[1]
This discovery is possible because the documents being pursued are physically
accessible to the researcher. They exist in physical space where they can be
found, fondled and chosen.
You can’t fondle a web
site.[2]
Regardless of the architecture imposed upon a web site a visitor cannot
conceive of the architecture in any physical fashion. What can the designer do
if they want to allow for unpredicted motion amongst their hierarchy of
documents? Browsing in libraries works because we know what to expect. We know
from a fairly early age how the books are arranged. We know, at least a little,
what effect traveling amongst the stacks and floors of the library will have on
the books. We can create relationships between true physical locations.
To get something similar
from a web site or other electronic resource a designer has to apply a metaphor
of some kind. It may be a simple common metaphor like papers in a filing
cabinet or it could be something more complex like houses on a street. In
either case there is a possibility of being able to move about: to the next
paper and next room or next file folder and next house. The metaphor creates a
sort of hierarchy.
Rosenfeld and Morville
mention metaphor-driven architectures with a caution:
While metaphor driven
exploration can be very useful while brainstorming, you should use caution when
considering a metaphor-driven global organization scheme. First, metaphors, if
they are to succeed, must be familiar to users…second, metaphors can introduce
unwanted baggage or be limiting. (p. 33)
These cautions are true but
miss out on a potentially important issue: any electronic information resource
is already constrained and potentially limited by a fundamental metaphor. We
view documents over the network as pages or screens. They are part of sites
conceptualized as being somewhere. An HTML document is not what we see when we
see a web page; we see instead something that has been rendered from some
electronic twinkles.
What matters, within and
without the metaphor, is a notion of proximity. Books are near to one another
on a shelf. How is near defined in a metaphor? How is near defined in electronic
twinkles? In what dimensions can we have near? In a metaphor of a filing
cabinet near is generally accepted as previous or next in the organizational
system. Near in time could be important too. When was this document added to
the system? May I travel to the previous or next document in the dimension of
time? Is the motion between the creation times of documents or between the
modification times of documents? What other dimensions are there?
If we want, as the
designers of an information resource, to allow for serendipitous discovery in
our resource we should make a strong effort to imagine as many definitions and
dimensions of proximity as will fit in our presentation metaphor. In addition
we should allow some method by which the metaphor may be broken or stripped to
allow for unexpected conceptions of the collection. If our metaphor doesn’t
expose a certain dimension of proximity well, it may be valuable to allow the
visitor to break free, get closer to the electronic twinkles and travel
according to their own rules. Some sites will never need such an option and
some visitors will never choose it, preferring the apparent “safety” of the
metaphor. Those that do choose it, though, may form unexpected connections,
reach surprising conclusions, and get more from the resource than they or the
designers planned.