Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

Chapter Six. Navigation and Other Aspects of Humane Interfaces

The average man suffers very severely from the pain of a new idea.

—Admiral William S. Sims

One of the most laudatory terms used to describe an interface is to say that it is “intuitive.” When examined closely, this concept turns out to vanish like the pea in a shell game and be replaced with the more ordinary but more accurate term “familiar.”

Our present systems of navigation, never satisfactory in the first place, are completely inadequate in the face of the terabytes of information we have to scan. But people and animals have been navigating through complex environments for millennia and have some useful techniques for doing so. These abilities, which have evolved over the eons, ...