[Sigia-l] People as scanners, browsers, scowsers and searchers

[Listera]

Louise Hewitt:

> However, putting all of the categories on the page might just be crazy-love in
> design terms and mean that no-one gets any of it.

A lot of the basic suppositions about display of hierarchical lists and the
content emanating thereof is mired in old-fashion page-based presentation.
It may be 99.98% bad.

Users are trained to *not* try and probe different paths because it used to
take so long to go to another page, perhaps realize it was the wrong choice,
reload the previous page, rinse and repeat. Couple that with most IAs'
obsession with minimum number of clicks to get from a link to a destination
and you've got a difficult proposition.

Whether it's Spotlight on desktop or Google online, we can now see that
real-time probing of categories is possible, and we pay no time penalty for
doing so. There's no page refresh and if the choice was wrong, we can
quickly retype it for immediate feedback.

This will naturally take some time to be internalized by application
designers and hopefully we'll soon see more interactive, real-time category
probing.

----
Ziya

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.