Something Else

Spatial Interaction

In 1929, Karl Lashley trained his rat to run a maze. One day his rat escaped near the mazes starting point and it ran right across the top of the maze directly to the goal-box. This suggested that his rat had a map of the territory, not just a trained path to the goal.

This rats determination for cheese lead to what Edward C. Tolman coined a cognitive map in 1948. Edward's research lead to the conclusion that the hippocampus was a crucial part of the human navigation system that aided declarative learning, spatial learning, and general memory formation.

At the time of Columbus, navigation was coastal (path navigation). The magnetic compass allowed direction finding. Latitude was calculated by measuring the height of the North Star at night or of the sun at noon. As time passed, astronomy, mathematics, and technology improved allowing for reliable map navigation. Combinations of path and map navigation was widely used and still is today. GPS (Global Positioning System) equipment however is now rendering almost all path navigation obsolete.

What can we do?
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LEARN

Linear Enviromental Augmented Reciprocal Navigation

LEARN

Linear Enviromental Augmented Reciprocal Navigation

This page uses a Hybrid Linear Reciprocal Navigation Structure. The goal of most navigation systems and any linear structure is to achieve a logical progression of thought and paths to ever increasing content. This section is an overview that can never be skipped. Unlike a Linear system, the user has two options to move on from here: continue down via scrolling or the UI or seek more information about this section by moving right. A story within a story or as I like to see it, optional depth.
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Linear navigation.

Linear navigation is really a global navigation structure but where global navigation is about choices, linear navigation is about a lack of choices. It can be seen as a A,B,C step approach, designed to read straight through like a book and get you to the end goal.
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Linear Reciprocal Navigation.

Linear Reciprocal Navigation follows a straight line through a website, but, it allows the visitor to move back and forth through the sequence. This will keep your visitor in one area of your website until they decide to opt out. Basically this is how a browser works. Linear navigation, if used correctly is very effective for storytelling. It can also be seen as a A, B, C sequence.
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Why use a single page site?

Linear structures are only appropriate for web sites meant to be displayed in a defined order. The biggest problem with linear structures is that because of the limited navigation style, as you progress through the site you will move farther and farther away from the home page, which can be confusing on websites with multiple pages. This Hybrid Linear Reciprocal Navigation Structure is a single-page site, therefore you are always home, never leaving the yellow brick road. One way of looking at this is rather then bringing the user to the content, we are bringing the content to the user. It can be seen as a A, B, Ba, Bb, Bc, Bd, C sequence.
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Why?

Linear Progression.

The single page site greatly reduces this fragmentation and enforces a linear progression. What holds back the single page site is content length, studies have actually proven long bodies of text online can cause reader depression. A large part of my topic surrounds attaching the virtual to reality, and in that light, if a book has pages then so should a site. But the web is a different medium and the screen a different canvas. A site is more like a unbound pile of pages that you dropped on the floor then a book. One solution lies in the organization of information. The pages in a book offer a pause, a moment of reflection, and time to process. The same can be applied to the single page site. Breaks can be achieved in text using images or what I do in my work, semantic sectioning.
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A Journey.

Hypertext Fragmintation.

These concepts are what my project ScreenType and Rolio were designing on. Sections are pages and pages are sites. Almost all of my work in the past year used a solution known as smooth scrolling. Hypertext fragmentation is like teleportation, one second you here and the next your somewhere else, we click around like this all day. The viewer is a moving target, traveling through ‘hyperspace’, and if your lucky their journey has them traveling though your content. Design is a process of story telling, we craft narratives and design provides the map. Smooth scrolling shows the user the journey and fights displacement. It wasn’t to long ago designers would joke that it was good that the user was lost in your site, exploring the net. In my opinion, the net has become to big and time to short to mess around.
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Rolling Rolling Rolio.

This child project of ScreenType, Rolio, broke ground a month ago. The prototype is my current solution to the single page site made familiar through skeuomorphisms and linear progression , (it is best viewed on desktop right now). It allows both a horizontal and vertical linear progression; it is a combination of our relationship with books and screens. In the end it will be combined with touch gestures and ScreenTypes foundation. It is way to early to measure its success. In a nut shell horizontal navigation is for depth while vertical is for browsing, making depth an option.
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The Physical Tangible World

How Rolio Helps in Trasition.

Wayfinding and mousing can be used to guide users in a preconceived path but there are always the rebels clicking away. This makes it difficult to secure a narrative with depth. We don’t usually deal with this problem in the physical tangible world, we don’t worry that a user will open a book to a random page, reality follows logic and linear sequences. Search engines for example often bring users to their search, not the beginning but the matched terms. This means a user could be starting anywhere and could be ‘turning the page’ randomly.