MAYA's challenge was to create an innovative approach that would appeal to diverse users. We chose to look beyond the obvious and design an on-screen environment to support interaction in real, not merely virtual, communities. A geography-based navigation scheme that organizes the screen by locations familiar to the user. Users can select from nine numbered sectors that contain target locations, such as a school, company, section of town, someone's house, and so on. Each time a user selects and zooms in on a sector, that sector subdivides into nine more sectors.
Subdivisions enable users to focus on successively more enlarged maps of the area.
A dynamic caricature map as a way for the system to adapt to what is most important to each user. To make important sites accessible while controlling screen clutter, the interface displays an exaggerated drawing of the site most likely to be of immediate interest to the viewer. Every circle has a bulletin board located somewhere on The Neighborhood map. Circles can be moderated or unmoderated, public or private.