for the love of links: tangential site design

May, 2000.
By Molly E. Holzschlag. (Link to original article.)

Okay, so I wanted an opportunity to write "tangential." It's a fun word—go on, say it! It moves around your mouth in a scintillating, wonderfully sensory way.

The sensory perception of media is what those of us building the Web need to pay close attention to. And the way we can begin to do this is with that simple, yet fundamental reality known as the link.

The link is the heart and soul of Web interactivity. Set aside dynamically generated pages and database driven sites for a moment. When you strip the Web down to its bare bones, it's the link that remains the most useful, important, and compelling part of a page.

Understanding hypermedia

Today's child can visit a Web site or view an interactive media presentation on a CD-ROM and have direct interaction with the characters. He or she can make decisions on where to go, how to follow a certain path of information, and very often, can affect the outcome of the environment by the linking selections or choices he or she makes within the process.

So from where does this interactivity come? In terms of the HTML author, the starting point is found within the Web's technical structure. Think about the hypertext environment, delivered through the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). The desire that its creators had was to allow for the publication of text-based documents that could be hyperlinked to ancillary references and resources.

It didn't take long before hypertext became hypermedia. When graphical interfaces became available and began supporting non-text media such as photographs or art, that media in turn took advantage of the tangential opportunities available in the form of hypermedia. This meant that you could set a graphic up as the clickable link into the next document.

As most of you already know, many options allow Web developers to tap into this interactive environment. Forms, interactive games, multimedia events such as virtual reality or live cameras, community bulletin boards, and real-time chat rooms all rely on various technologies that get wrapped up with HTML and HTTP to enable the end user to interact with a Web site, or with other individuals on the Web.

Not only can Web designers offer these opportunities on their sites, but they can also extend that interaction to other people via community forums, guestbooks, mail programs and chat rooms can occur—with real people, all over the world.

Interacting with media

Two items—interactivity and linearity—come to the surface as concepts we really need work with in order to achieve our linking goals. Once we have an understanding of the interactive, and how we can affect linearity, we can then move on to create Web structures using intelligent linking.

Interactive media presented can be classified as new media. This is because such media take traditional output in the form of print, graphic presentations, audio, animation, and video, and places them at our fingertips.

"New media are not bridges between man and nature," said media guru Marshall McLuhan, "they are nature."

And, according to McLuhan's vision, new media is as natural as we are: sensory, perceptual, and expressive.

This is especially evident in the way that new media connects with us individually. Whether it is through community-based interactions, or by the power of choice offered to us via multimedia events, or even B2B (Business to Business) models, new media should be thought of as active. This isn't the TV of our youth. Although entertaining and informative, TV doesn't offer too many interactive events or choices for us.

This isn't to say that TV isn't relevant, but that the Web—via links—offers entrance into relationships. I love television, and I particularly loved it as a child, when, in the quiet of morning with my parents still asleep, I would sneak into the den and turn on my favorite Saturday morning cartoons.

In my PJs, I would watch those cartoons, laughing at the Road Runner's antics. I was involved with the story line and enjoyed the personalities of my favorite cartoon characters, but there were limits on this relationship. I could not touch the characters, could not alter their actions, could not interact with them, and could not use them as a passage to other, related entertainment.

I didn't have a sensory relationship with these characters. Nothing extended beyond their remote and preconceived design. On the Web, add a link to an animated character, and you step into something beyond the perceived limitations of the linear, expected world.

Linearity

A compelling aspect of the Web that stems from the hypermedia environment is that the Web's format can be interpreted as being non-linear. I believe that putting the Web in this context will help provide you with a frame of reference for a better understanding of how sites are built.

Books are read page-by-page. This is a linear activity. Another familiar, linear act is how most Westerners perceive time. We see it as a logical order of days, one following another in a line. It's interesting to note that in some cultures, time is perceived as a spiral. Linear activities dominate Western civilization, however, and that the Web is such a curiosity—and challenge—to its developers often relates to the fact that it is essentially unlike most of our familiar constructs.

Web sites, unlike a book, can be constructed to take you from the middle of a sentence or a thought to another, ancillary thought. Or, that link can take you to some data whose relationship to the originating data is not immediately clear.

What happens when a person is interacting with information in this way is that he or she can, and often does, depart from this linear structure into one that allows for a more free-flowing, non-linear event. The popular term, surfing the Web, sums up this freedom well—suggesting that moving from Web site to Web site is a fun and fluid journey, rather than a strict, regimented one.

It becomes imperative that the individual designing Web pages understand how this environment offers organizational structures that are both like and unlike those with which we are most familiar. Books and flow charts are linear and are perfectly acceptable for certain designs on the Web, but to tap into the non-linear world and make it a relevant experience for the Web site visitor is to enhance his or her experience, and challenge your own capabilities. Not to mention providing excitement for your senses.

The basis of site structure

Because most site visitors are accustomed to linear structure, and are most familiar with organizing information into such structures, it's very important to give most functional sites enough linearity to be comfortable and navigable.

A truly linear Web site is much like a book. Each page is placed to the conceptual "right" of the next, and there's an opportunity to page forward, or back.

Figure 1 shows a linear structure. You'll see it looks like a book. Start at page one, move on. Or, flip backward. On the Web, this is done with links.

Another familiar structure in our linear world is the hierarchical, or flow-chart method of mapping a Web site. In a case of this nature, I can offer links that move from level to level as well as from side to side. Figure 2 shows a hierarchy. But as you begin to add links that take you to multiple areas inside and outside of the site (Figure 3) the linearity becomes less evident.

So what about a non-linear site? Well, a true non-linear site would have completely random links. What this means is that no matter where I clicked, I wouldn't know where in the Web world I was going to end up. And that is really thinking outside the box.

But is the non-linear model appropriate for your needs? In its most pure sense, probably not! But how about looking at models that integrate aspects of the familiar, linear constructs, and then offer a bit of spin.

So how do we add some non-linear options to a site?

• Begin with a linear or hierarchical structure.
• Add links from any place within that site to another section of that same site.
• Add links to external sites.
• Consider a randomizer of sorts, where people click a link and get anything—might be inside your site, might be outside. Either way, it's different than contained, linear, controlled environments.

Try it out! A couple of intriguing examples for you include the complex hierarchy of the Tucson Weekly (note forward, back, and issue jumping navigation options as you get deeper into the publication), and the randomizer at CoreWave's Glass Bead Game.

Choose your links

The non-linear experience allows and encourages user choice. Every person coming to this site can conceivably surf it differently. This, in turn, creates an individual, flowing experience, rather than a highly structured one. However, for standard designs, you may need to begin cautiously. Start with a linear structure to make the site sensible and help people maintain a sense of place.

Go on—don't be afraid. Choose your links! Build sites that use the fundamental uniqueness of linking to provide excitement and sensory engagement for your site visitors.