SerendipitousNavigation

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Visualization

("visualization"?)

Thinking about navigation of websites and other information artifacts tends to focus on providing users with effective ways of quickly getting exactly where they want to go (time-to-task-completion studies, click minimization, etc). But an important secondary aspect of human interaction with rich information artifacts involves serendipitous discovery; finding something that you didn't know you were looking for. The child who stumbles on "tatpurusha" while looking up "tatterdemalion" in the Unabridged has benefited from serendipitous discovery, resulting from the inefficient, and inherently serendipitous, navigation technology of a paper dictionary.

The Problem

Minimizing clicks, cutting down time-to-task-completion, improving the precision of searches, and other nominal navigation goods can as a side effect reduce the frequency of serendipitous discovery, since they reduce the amount of information the user obtains that is not directly related to getting to a known endpoint.

Sample Solutions

What allows the user to explicitly explore the space serendipitously, without doing a particular task (eg search).

Randomness

Random links, such as:

The RandomPage button in MeatballWiki (a UseMod feature not enabled on all installations) lets the user dive into the entire page space at random.
Many WebLog services have a link for getting RandomWebsites? using their service.
Randomness/fuzziness can be used in search results.
Random links of some kind can appear in a sidebar other navigation area.

Related links

Some online dictionaries (e.g. [the Oxford English Dictionary]) present terms in the context of the N nearest terms in alphabetical order (so our searcher for tatterdemalion might find tatpurusha even online).
Amazon.com (and other shopping sites, although usually to a lesser degree) introduce side information during ordinary navigation, of the general form "other people who did things similar to what you're doing also did X". This effectively suggests tangents and serendipitous discovery to users who may have originally had only one specific narrow goal in mind.
BackLinks, whether listed on every page or available as a list by one click (standard in most wikis - click on the title of any page).
VisitedLink implements the idea "People who visited this page moved on to X."
The file-handling software for most GraphicalUserInterface? shows icons of files in windows/directories full of related files (organized by "user" effort or system design). Many other interfaces have similar clustering - ZoomingInterfaceParadigm.

Other

In WikiWiki, serendipitous discoveries are often made through AccidentalLinking.

Serendipitous Experiences

The Opera browser (and others) include a search field as the same level as the main URL entry field. DavidChess began using MeatballWiki in December of 2003 because, wanting to look at the MetaBaby site, he typed "metababy" into the Opera search field instead of typing http://www.metababy.com/ into the URL field; the first two hits were on MetaBaby itself, but the third was the MeatballWiki MetaBaby page.

Discussion

Should serendipitous navigation occur only at explicit user request? Presenting the user with fuzzy results and possible tangents might be annoying or distracting if the user in fact has some single goal in mind, and wants to accomplish it as quickly as possible.

How might serendipitous navigation beyond the RandomPage button be added to a Wiki?

There's a clash here with Tmesis (WhatIsTmesis) and HumaneInterface - SerendipitousNavigation encourages provision of scenic routes and information that is not immediately relevant, where considerations of Tmesis suggest a more focused approach.

Not sure what you mean. The ZoomingInterfaceParadigm mentioned in the HumaneInterface seems to provide some serendipity. Tmesis sounds like a human practice/ability that makes it okay to add a little serendipity-inducing 'noise', because people are able to skip it.

btw, "serendipity" comes from Serendib, an old Arab name for WikiPedia:Sri_Lanka.

CategoryInterfaceDesign CategoryNavigation