evanmeagher

After letting it sit in my downloads folder for many months after it was dugg, I finally got around to reading more of Bret Victor’s paper on information software design entitled Magic Ink. This thing is a beast of 73 pages and absolutely packed with well laid out information. That being said, I’ve barely read a quarter of it, so expect more posts referencing it.

One interesting point that Victor presents is the notion that interaction (i.e. navigation through a website or software) is in essence detrimental.

“Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. Many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic.”

This idea that navigation is inherently bad reminded me of a design trend among large-scale news websites that I find extremely irritating. You know how a lot of big old-media sites tend to break up articles into way more pages than are necessary? For example, sites that break up semi-long articles into half a dozen pages in order to display one viewport’s worth of text at a time and “Top n ” pages like this one.

I HATE that.

Pages like these are so tedious to navigate through that I usually don’t bother reading them. The amount of time and effort wasted by having to click and load separate pages containing little blurbs of information is much greater than the effort taken to scroll down. It’s time old-media websites realize this and stop frustratingly hand-feeding us content.