The Page Paradigm - What users do on any given web page
Via Simon Willison I found an article by Mark Hurst about his Page Paradigm idea.
A couple of quotes first off
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
and
Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!
Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal.
I like this idea, and I would suggest it’s not just web developers who have this problem, some large projects I’ve bee involved in recently have suffered from this exact kind of tinkering from the clients. So and so a section should be colour coded the same as something else, people might want to see all stuff related to this thing….
Everything ends up ‘having’ to be interconnected and becomes mind nummingly confusing and awkward.
This seems to be a result of design by commitees and overthinking functionality where the actual goals aren’t referred to properly. Something has an overall objective, but then there’s a rapid kind of feature creep where they say “ohh, form there it would be good if people could…”, when actually, it’s probably irrelevant and just adding clutter to a page.
But what do I know, I’m just the guy who’s got to turn it all into working web pages, I don’t understand the audience, or have any idea of what does and doesn’t work on the web….