raleighnet.org

I don’t know that I agree with this, but it’s interesting all the same. The premise is that we talk about navigating when we mean understanding.

I suppose it depends on the context, but generally, I’m not interested in understanding a web site. There are particular answer(s) to particular question(s) that I’m interested in finding, but that’s a very different thing.

Where I am interested in the complete navigation structure of a site, I think of it in terms of an outline, so regardless of how it’s layed out or how the nav structures are revealed to the user, I see it as a directory tree. I wonder if less experienced users approach it from a different perspective.