This article has got to be one of the most important and profound pieces on information design yet written. Unfortunately, it’s largely theoretical, meaning it’s not immediately obvious how to apply it to navigation solutions; furthermore, its chief point is that navigation is not strictly separable from content, meaning that there probably aren’t broad theoretical solutions for navigation anyway. But the issues it raises are complex, and need serious consideration.
Much of the article is concerned solely with attacking what was at the time of the article’s publication – 1997 – the dominant metaphor for web organization, physical navigation. Once the preliminary falderol is dispensed with, however, you get to the meat of the article – which is to say, the claim that the entire way we think about web navigation is wrong. In the conventional model, users employ navigation as a map to get to a particular screen displaying the information they’re looking for. According to Dillon and Vaughn, however, the processes of navigation and information can’t be disassociated in this way.
In Dillon and Vaughn’s account – backed up by some serious empirical evidence – information acquisition demands not just viewing of information, but that this information be assimilated into one’s own ‘knowledge structures’ and related to other information. In other words, content matters. Domain novices and domain experts, for instance, apparently use different means to orient themselves within documents. While physical organization (layout, site structure) may prove extremely helpful to novice users, expert users have complex rationales for orientation based on document content. Because they are familiar with the genre of particular writings, with the inference structure typical of these, and the verbal markers most often used for both of these, expert users employ comprehension of generic structure to find their way through documents.
It seems impossible to put the matter more succinctly than Dillon and Vaughn do themselves:
Comprehension is not something ‘other than’ navigation, some form of task that is independent of the process of moving through the information space. Rather it is an intrinsic component of information use … The purpose of moving through the information space is frequently the same purpose as the journey, to reach an end point of comprehension – and in this case the journey is the destination.
As noted above, the notion of information shape proposed as a means of describing this cognitive journey is a complex one ‘invok[ing] ideas of discourse communities, traditional forms and emerging digital document types’; there’s no magic bullet for this one.
The upside, however, is that this does open up the possibility that users might be guided through a site – that a site might in other words be ‘persuasive’ – in a natural and useful fashion arising out of the characteristics of digital genre; that is to say, navigation ’solutions’ will fall naturally out of content.
Design Observer
Apologies for the apparent “falderol” and all that theory, but it does appear that you managed to get the points clearly — no quibbles from me on your summary. Yes, content matters…A LOT, and forced separation of meaning from mapping is a flawed model that just won’t die, it’s been with us for decades and every new technology causes people to reinvent it. Information possesses the property of shape, we are just struggling to learn how to exploit this in design, but nobody said innovation was easy…..