Patterns of use
We’re pretty comfortable building normatative websites these days. Safe standards have emerged for layout and navigation. Users don’t have to learn the interface every time they go to a new url, which is great, and the design function is largely relegated to colouring-in and decorating the same structure as everyone else.
However, meerly replicating ‘what everyone else does’ isn’t design. And sometimes we need to look at things in a different way to get back to really designing something.
Undoubtedly we consider a website as a visual/linguistic form rather than a sculptural, spatial or tactile one, and more often than not when we talk about moving though a site, we talk about clicking links, page transitions, or steps in a process, rather than much we physically move in order to access those links.
One way of seeing what happens physically is to capture the mouse movements of the user, and display them as lines (the current background of this blog was generated by navigating though all the links on the site). Like tracks in the snow, or the patina of fingerprints on a door-handle these traces can show us quite a lot about the ergonomics of the site, and the human moving though space.
Looking at the graphic above, the current layout I’m using for this blog does seem to have have a slight ergonmics problem. The menu and navigation system is sufficient, and the majority of movement is kept to the top-left of the site. But why does the user need to go all the way over there (—>) in order to scroll down the page to read the content? OK, some users will have ‘wheels’ on their mice, or know to press the down arrow, or “pg_dn”, but a lot of people don’t.
The ideal place for that scroll-bar isn’t the extreme right of the screen (where the browser puts it), but instead, the densely crossed area to the left of the main content and to the right of the ‘Archives’. In this case, an intuitive reasoning (place a control mechanism near what is being controlled) is bourne out by physical measurements, and graphing the movement has indicated a potential design solution.
But why bother? Well, by reducing the distances needed for the hand to move within an interface, we can possibly assist those with motor-control problems, reduce RSI and create easier to use user interfaces for the average user. In this light, it may well be conceivable that a strongly normative design (i.e. replicating what everyone else is doing) is actually unhealthy for our users.
