In order to design effectively for the web, you have to first understand how people behave when they’re online. For the web is fundamentally different from print, TV, or other media to which it’s often compared.
People use different media differently:
- People read magazines.
- People watch television.
- But people navigate the web as if it were a physical space.
Although the computer screen is physically flat-more one-dimensional than a book, even-people move through the web as if it were a physical space. They scan each page for navigational cues, then move forward mentally, closing in on their destination. “Where should I go?” they think, instead of “What should I read?”
This is no small difference. The transition from reading a magazine, for example, to using the web requires a cognitive shift: When a person stares into a monitor, the cursor on the screen (controlled by the mouse in her hand) becomes an extension of her physical body. So the task of navigating the web feels very much the same, mentally, as navigating a physical space.
This is exactly what Marshall McLuhan might have predicted. In the early years of television, McLuhan published influential theories on how people interact with-and are shaped by-media. “All media are extensions of some human faculty-psychic or physical,” he wrote in The Medium is the Message. “The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye…clothing an extension of the skin…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”
If users do project themselves into the screen (the cursor becoming an abstract representation of the body), this goes a long way toward explaining not only how people feel online, but also how they act. Most people navigate web sites as if they were running through an airport, looking for their gate: Quickly, purposefully, and sometimes desperately.
Designing for users on the run
Theory aside, the spatial nature of the web is what makes navigation so important. In many ways, designing a web site is more like designing a public space than a printed page.
Users arrive at your site with a purpose in mind, and your goal in designing the site is to get them to their destination as quickly as possible, providing the most direct pathways marked by the most universally recognized symbols.
Most people
navigate
web sites
as if they
were running
through an airport,
looking for their gate.Most people navigate web sites as if they were running through an airport, looking for their gate.
So web design is an architectural problem, as much as a visual one. And as architectural problems go, it’s a challenging one, because people can’t rely on any of the visual clues-or other senses-they use to navigate real-world spaces.
In the real world, people can size things up more easily: They can see how big a building is, and they can see who else is there. They can tell how noisy it is, and what it smells like. They can see where the doors are. And if they get lost, they can always retrace their steps or ask someone for help.
But the web is abstract, and it offers no such clues. Your senses are limited to what you can see in the browser. And there’s no one around to help you if you get lost. So it falls to the site’s design-and particularly the navigation-to fill all these roles. It must communicate what kind of site it is, tell users what’s there, orient them to where they are, point them to where they’re going, and show them how to get back.
No one said it was going to be easy.
