Movement
Image source: Both images from The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch.
I want to draw out this point about architects understanding how people see space because it’s where the metaphor of Web-as-physicality meets experience design, and gets furthest away from the technological roots of our medium.
These two images are from Kevin Lynch’s book, The Image of the City (summary).
In this book, Lynch says that the internal map people have of a city is not expressed in terms of road signs and street addresses – not in terms of reading the words of the city, in other words – but the internal map is developed through visual perception and the experience of moving through the space.
Let me put that another way. On the left is an outline map of the city of Boston, and we regularly draw it. On the right is the visual form of Boston, expressed as entities called paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Edges are things like rivers, across which you can’t move. Paths are connected series of road, along which you flow. Districts are areas of the city you feel you are within.
Lynch derives these entities from interviewing people and watching them draw maps, so he’s worth paying attention to.
Once a person understands the structure of a place, they can get around it and tell other people how to get around it. But since this internal map comes from experience and visual perception – not from looking at sign-posts – it indicates that an urban planner must think in terms of providing a character to neighbourhoods, of providing the right kind of edges, of making the paths really flow. A city which doesn’t communicate its structure to simple visual perception is one that has, in Lynch’s terms, poor imageability.
And you can see immediately how the concept of imageability is important to large websites. The districts, paths and edges of the website are not merely in the organisation of the data, but need to be communicated to users through their visual perception and experience.
I think if we got the sitemap of, say, Amazon.com or MSN (well actually not MSN, because their recent redesign is really good), and drew it in terms of Lynch’s entities, and then made sure the surface of every page communicated this structure, I think we’d improve people’s experience and exploration of those sites immeasurably.