This article appeared in Internet-on-a-Disk #18, September 1996.
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The movie "Six Degrees of Separation" is based on the premise that everyone in the world is only six people away from knowing everyone else in the world (by the chain of I know A who knows B who knows C...) There are some games on the Web which play on that same notion -- you start at any random Web page and try to arrive at a predetermined destination using as few clicks as possible.
Having often experienced the frustration of having to click again and again and again within a Web site to get to information that I need and that I know is there, it occurred to me that "degrees of separation" should be a design goal/principle for both Web sites and Web software. Far too often, the user has to go from one menu of links to another to another to another. (For example, last night, my wife was checking out jobs at the new Boston Herald site -- http://www.bostonherald.com/ -- and had to click again and again, each time waiting for useless decorative graphics to load.)
Sometimes Webmasters set up their sites this way out of a mistaken notion that small pages make for ease of use. Hence they deliberately limit the size of their pages to two or three screens full of information at most.
Basically, the fewer the clicks the better. At my own little Web site -- www.samizdat.com -- which now has over 1300 pages, I aim for two clicks as a limit -- in other words, no matter where you enter, you should be no more than two clicks away fr0m any other page at the site.
Clicking is not a pleasurable activity; it's a means to an end. And navigating through a Web site shouldn't be link finding your way through a maze. Keep it simple.
To some extent, design is mixture of taste and utility. What makes Web page design particularly difficult is that the utility of different designs depends on your computing platform. And while many Webmasters seem to use UNIX workstations, an increasingly large majority of the potential audience for Web pages uses PCs.
The notion of limiting Web pages to three screens makes good sense from a UNIX workstation point of view. But from my PC, navigation within a page is a breeze. I rarely use the scroll bar. Instead, I use CONTROL-end and CONTROL-home to go to the bottom and then to the top again; or Page-up and Page-down; internal links within the page; and the Find function in my browser. Hence, as a user, I delight in large, content-rich pages. And the more relevant links the better.
Two and three years ago, when I was accessing the Web through a UNIX workstation, it made sense to me to keep Web pages small. But today, I'm a PC-person; and at my little site, the overwhelming majority of visitors are PC-people. And they keep cheering me on to make my already monstrous home page even larger and more content-rich. And AltaVista and other search engines help immensely by indexing it all for me, and making it easy for people to find what's at my site without the need for tree-like directories.
Personally, I don't care for frames or navigational bars in the margins, which reduce the useful viewing area of the screen and make page design more complicated than it needs to be. But that aspect of page design is probably more a matter of taste than utility.
I'm not sure if these are the right answers, but I'm convinced that this is the right question. We need to be open and experiment, using our Web pages as sandboxes to determine what are the optimum design rules for today's clients, and we need to share with one another what we learn.
Last thought - as we experiment, we should focus on utility first and process second. In other words, we should do what ever is necessary to make sure Web pages look and work the way they ought, rather than simply accepting the way today's automated tools make them look.
For example, I act as host for a series of chat sessions on Business on the World Wide Web at the Boston Globe's Web site (http://www.boston.com/), Thursdays from noon to 1 PM (Eastern Time, US). After each session, I rearrange and edit the transcript by hand to make the threads visible, and to add hyperlinks to pages and email addresses mentioned in the discussion. The immediacy of the chat application -- bringing people of common interest together at a regular scheduled time -- generates lots of good content in a short time. And the handcrafted editing afterwards turns a chaotic sequence of messages into a very readable and usable document.
Meanwhile, on the intranet inside Digital Equipment, I'm using the same simple techniques that I use for my personal site to build a central resource for information about marketing and selling Internet products and services. There, instead of using an automated application like hypermail to take the email messages sent out over internal Internet-related distribution lists and turn them into Web pages, I'm doing the conversion by hand -- putting related items together and using internal links for cross-referencing, and creating the context the way I would like it to be. And rather than rely on automated databases for contact information, I'm building my own page of internal Internet-related contacts, so I can conveniently browse to see who I want and so I can send email to someone by just clicking on a mail:to link.
These are labor-intensive tasks, but my goal is utility. If users then find that the utility is of value, then there is a basis for lobbying to get software developed or modified to make it easier to produce these kinds of outcomes.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
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