Blazing the trail (1995)

Electronic information is proliferating at an exponential rate with limited concern for design or usability. Thousands of people yearly are adding dynamic information to the World Wide Web while hundreds of thousands more "surf" the Internet through Mosaic and other services. Periodicals, encyclopedias, and even news services are now published electronically. CD-ROM titles are replacing software on merchant shelves.Each of these forays into the electronic information frontier present opportunities and challenges. Tapping the vast reservoir of world-wide knowledge and interacting with individuals across the globe will surely richen our awareness, if not change our social and political ways of life. At the same time the frontier is expansive and largely uncharted. Finding our way is often like stumbling in the dark and knowing where we are as disorienting as the middle of a desert --- indeed, an unforgiving place to be lost in. Witness the number of Internet directories recently published. Useful, yes, however, most compensate for the Internet's inherent navigation problems.Like the pioneers who crossed the North American continent, or those who first sailed the Atlantic Ocean, we too are pioneers on the electronic information frontier. Whether as authors, blazing the trail and creating outposts of information, or as consumers in quest of knowledge, we face similar obstacles and possibilities. Too often on-line "help", the World Wide Web of hyperlinked information, or electronic periodicals are largely inaccessible, difficult to digest, and abandoned in frustration. Confronted by these large and unfamiliar volumes, users ask themselves "where am I?" and "is what I'm looking for really here?"This article describes two products where integrated design of information structure and graphic affordances ease user access and exploration. Multiple recognizable metaphors visually identify information categories, helping users create a predictable cognitive map of the information-space. Throughout the article we discuss some alternatives we explored, constraints we accommodated, and our design perspectives.This information design was commercially released by Hewlett-Packard in 1993 as part of a process management software package. The design principals were improved and reapplied in the design of Access HP --- an interactive graphical on-line information service --- made public in early 1994 and part of the World Wide Web (WWW) [1]. These product successes relied on iterative design, structured information, visual thinking --- and above all, full collaboration between information engineers and visual design professionals.As geographically disperse users increasingly access distributed hyper-information reservoirs, user-centered design becomes vitally important. Requirements for what we call the Four Axes of Information Architecture --- information affordability, applicability, accessibility, and anonymity --- must be addressed. Remembering that we're all pioneers --- both as authors and users --- on the electronic information frontier, we conclude with observations about these design considerations for professionals engaged in distributed on-line information design.