Out with the Old, in with the Older
Miller’s insight is as important today as when he wrote those words. However, despite mankind’s age-old proclivity for perceiving things in the context of space and time, the majority of today’s Web experiences resemble a relatively recent invention: the book. Books comprise the following:
- pages of information that are organized into sections
- a table of contents that lists those sections
- an index of all the concepts an author has mentioned in the book
The architecture of most Web sites follows this same pattern:
- pages of information that are organized into sections
- a navigation bar that lists those sections
- tag clouds or keywords for all the concepts the site mentions
This similarity is understandable. As content shifted from print to digital in the early days of the Web, we transferred our approaches from the old medium to the new one. However, while this may have been expedient at the time, the effectiveness of the book metaphor has diminished, and this metaphor is now holding us back.
The Medium Is the Message
At this point, the skeptic in you might be thinking, “What difference does it make whether we think of Web sites as being book-like or spatial—just let them be Web sites.” While it’s true that Web sites certainly have an identity of their own, it’s impossible to consider them apart from the cognitive model that we use to understand them. In their influential book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson convey the important role that conceptual metaphors play in our everyday lives: [2]
“Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.”
The time has come to adopt a more appropriate metaphor for interacting with information, one that acknowledges the spatial reality of human psychology. I believe that we have such a metaphor in information wayfinding—a concept that depicts interacting with digital information as analogous to navigating a physical environment.
Wayfinding as Spatial Problem Solving
Kevin Lynch coined the term wayfinding in his 1960 book, The Image of the City. [3] Lynch recognized that a person’s ability to navigate a city relates closely to how spatially oriented that person is within the city. He quantified a city’s navigability according to its imagability—that is, the likelihood of its evoking strong images in observers, and therefore, enhancing their sense of orientation.
Architect and environmental psychologist Romedi Passini further developed the concept of wayfinding in the 1970s and 1980s. [4] Defining the term simply as “spatial problem solving,” Passini identified three interrelated cognitive processes that wayfinding requires:
- Developing a decision plan. A person forms as precise a plan of action as possible based on his goal. For example, wanting to visit the British Museum would involve numerous intermediate decisions such as finding the nearest tube station, determining which tube line to take, finding the correct platform, and so on.
- Executing a decision from the plan. Once the person has made a decision, he must execute it at the right place and time.
- Processing environmental information. To execute a decision correctly, however, the person must notice and comprehend relevant information from the environment. In addition, changes in the environment—a closed tube station, for instance—frequently prompt changes to the decision plan.
Wayfinding has much in common with the way we know people interact with information. In particular, Marcia Bates’s berrypicking model of information seeking [5] portrays a process where—to paraphrase Peter Morville [6]—what you find along the way changes what you seek. Likewise, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card’s information foraging theory [7] compares information seeking to rummaging for food in the forest, where users follow information scent as they sniff their way onward. Both models present information seeking in terms of spatial problem solving.
