Discuss: Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer

by Aaron Rester

21 Why not Web Designer as Urbanist!

Brilliant article! As an urban designer by trade and occasional web developer by hobby i often find myself using the city as a metaphor for web layout rather than just cartography. And I’ve written elsewhere about urban design and architecture becoming more and more like information architecture (google “q-dar quameleon” or “quantumcity press”)… and the link between memory and urban space, with the requisite nod to Lefevre. so thanks again for a wonderful and unexpected insight here at ALA, it proves yet again that our current worldview is coalescing more and more across disciplines.

posted at 12:08 am on August 27, 2008 by ayssar arida

22 Mapping users' actions

If I’m interpreting things correctly, the paradigm shift we’re talking about here is asking: “How do users want to interact with my site” instead of “How do I think my site should be structured.” It reminds me of something Liz Danzico mentioned in her presentation at AEA SF last week. She talked about “residue lines” (you know, like paths beaten into the grass where people actually walk) as paths of things people want, but which the architects didn’t provide. It comes down to watching and listening to users closely, and then adapting to what you find.

In practical terms, we can go a long way by doing user-testing early and often. Perhaps it means creating a quick and dirty HTML or other prototype that you can get into users’ hands while you’re still in the early stages of design. Perhaps there is user-testing built into multiple stages of the process. Or it could mean more initial research on the sites your target users actually go to, and how they use them. It may just mean putting yourself in your users’ shoes a little better, and figuring out where they expect to find things, and how they expect to get around.

I hope my view of this article hasn’t been too narrow, since a lot of these ideas aren’t necessarily new. I loved the article, and I’ll hope to see more discussion on its practical application here.

posted at 10:24 pm on August 27, 2008 by Nathan Walton

23 Thanks

The right article just in time to push me in the right line of thinking about a problem I have been mentally chewing on for some time (nothing to do with websites as a matter of fact ;-) )

I am not a cartographer, but have been working with (visualisation of) geographical and geospatial information. Why the metaphor of the cartogrpaher is so relevant IMHO is that you can represent the exact same data in different ways: as a very detailed exact mapping of the real situation or a very abstract schematic network representation. Which representation is relevant to a user is depended on the context in which a user needs the information! You just serve them the right memory map.

I think the web is slowly moving into a direction of being able to pick the representation of the same data that best fits the use at the moment you access the information (let the user pull up one of his stored memory maps). The role of the webdesigner is to be able to indentify the different uses and come up with different presentations that fit the intended use, instead of the one-design-fits-all approach we see on the majority of sites (even on the supposed web 2.0 sites).

How to get there is probably a way of experimenting and having people around like the author of this article.

posted at 10:09 am on August 28, 2008 by Martijn ten Napel

24 Paths through the grass

This reminds me of how sidewalks are often built on college campuses:

First, a set of sidewalks are built based on what the architects feel will be good and logical paths between buildings.

Later it becomes apparent, as tracks are worn through the grass, that students have other ideas about which paths are good and logical. They can’t be stopped, and the dirt paths are unattractive, so the dirt paths are soon paved over.

As destinations rise and fall in prominence, new dirt paths appear, and the process starts again.

Here’s where the web should have an advantage: the campus is stuck with all their old sidewalks as the green spaces become crisscrosses of concrete, but the web is agile enough to respond and update unused pathways.

posted at 06:46 pm on August 28, 2008 by Chris Herdt

25 Interesting Metaphor

Insightful, but I think now that you’ve enticed us with an interesting metaphor and a great classical reference you should spend more time on concrete things we can take away from this theory. What does it suggest about how we should approach structure? Can you use it to point out common flaws in design? I hope you develope the concept more.

posted at 08:33 am on August 29, 2008 by Justen Robertson

26 Inspiring article

Wow, this was really nice article to read. I’m in very similar situation to author: I’ve been hired to redesign the website of our Uniiversity of Applied Sciences. That job is about done now, but my greatest challenge is yet to be achieved. Next in line is our intranet, which needs heck lot of redesigning. Your article was very inspiring, so thank you for that!

posted at 10:58 am on August 29, 2008 by Ville Väisänen

27 Great Metaphors

Love these metaphors of mapping and safari. When you have 6,000 pages of information I think that definitely qualifies as an adventure.

posted at 07:06 pm on August 29, 2008 by Brett Tilford

28 Untitled

Interesting. It certainly gives a different perspective from the traditional architect metaphor.

Whether it applies quite so well to a simple, static brochure site as it does to a 6000 page community site is debatable, but certainly worth considering nonetheless.

I think the lesson in either case is to pay more attention to the end-user and be less precious about our own grand ideas.

posted at 07:40 pm on August 29, 2008 by Matt Ots

29 Following Up

Thanks again to all of you for taking the time to read and comment on this admittedly very abstract article. Mulling over your comments during the past week, I’ve had a chance to think a bit more about the practical implications of adding a new metaphor to describe what it is that we do when we make websites.

The most basic practical implications of this article, I think, have nothing to do with its content and everything to do with stirring up the kind of conversation we’re seeing here. The occasional questioning of a discipline’s foundational assumptions is necessary for that discipline to grow — from conversation and argument grow new ideas that can push the discipline in new directions. Frankly, I rather wish more folks who commented here disagreed with me. For the sake of the profession, anyway. :-)

In any case, looking back at the article again, I think the practical core of the article is a call for user-centric design. This is certainly not a novel idea, but there can never be enough reminders that we should be building websites for our users, and not for ourselves or our clients.

More specifically, it is a challenge to change the process by which we as web designers determine a site’s structure. I love the idea (raised by a number of commenters) of building a website like paths on a college campus, allowing users to create the map, charting the natural flows of information the way one would chart foot traffic through the quad. At first glance, this ideas sounds a bit absurd when applied to an informational website — how, and why, would you build a site with no structure at all and then expect people to be able to find anything? I think some sort of underlying structure would be nescessary — after all, on the campuses in question, classroom buildings, dorms, and other landmarks are presumably built with some sort of relationship already implied.

The folksonomy approach suggested by some commenters addresses the aim to allow users to determine structure, but I’ll confess that I don’t think I’ve yet seen a truly successful folksonomy-based site (if you know of one, please set me straight). Unfortunately, folksonomies get very unwieldy very quickly (I’m imagining billowing thunderclouds of tags), which can impede their usefulness. So I wonder: are there ways other than tag clouds to implement a folksonomy system? I suppose sites like Digg.com might be considered a folksonomy of sorts, in which users’ voting up or down of content partially determines that content’s relationship to the content around it. Conceivably a system like that might not only help determine which content users found most useful, but also enable them to have a say on how content should fit together on the site.

I guess I’ve started wandering into slightly more theoretical territory once again, but I remain very curious as to what the readers of ALA see as the practical import of all of this theoretical talk, if any, and I throw the question out to you: how might seeing yourself as a cartographer as well as an architect change the way you work?

posted at 07:20 am on September 2, 2008 by Aaron Rester