Story

Whether you’re a student in college, a design professional, or an author of a book, you have all experienced the clutter of notes, reminders, memos, drawings, and documents scattered across the surface of your desk. There comes a point in this chaotic, unorganized display, when your tidy instinct begs for some order.

If your lucky, you quickly find materials you can use: a binder, file folders with the colored tabs, paper clips, even a stapler. You initially grab the content, sort and filter as a means for organizing and making order. As you organize, you may classify the data by such lateral relationships as (see Chapter 3, Display of Information):

Having now integrated your organizational skills with those office supplies, you can marvel at the clean desk. On its surface lay a faceted arrangement of folders. Each folder is clearly labeled with colored tabs housing written descriptions. Within each folder, a hierarchy exists of related content.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Displaying Information, we understand the importance of organizing an information structure across a single page, or an entire OS. To recap, we know that are two main types of organizing with information architecture.

Lateral Access and the Mobile Space

Now that the content has been organized and designed to follow an information architecture, you will need to consider how the users will access all of that information on a mobile device.

Important things to consider:

To account for these issues, consider presenting the information with lateral access. Content that is organized laterally is at the same level tier in the information architecture.

Benefits of lateral Access:

Principles to Consider

Follow the Rules of Wayfinding and Norman’s Interface Model

Wayfinding

Whether interacting on a PC, kiosk, mobile device, your users can easily get lost when navigating content. To reduce the frustration of being lost, visual, haptic, and even auditory cues can be used to help guide the user in getting to the place he needs to be.

Designing a navigation system must provide those cues to answer the following user questions:

  1. Where is my current state or position within the environment? Where am I on this page?
  2. Where is my destination? Where do I have to go to achieve my end goal?
  3. How do I get to my destination? How am I going to navigate across content to achieve my end goal?
  4. How do I know when I have arrived?
  5. How do I plan my way back? Are there alternate routes I can take?

Kevin Lynch, an Environmental psychologist, determined that we rely on certain objects, as cues, to help us define our position within an environment. Let’s examine how these objects, as they relate to lateral access, can be used to improve navigation.

Mapping

Mapping describes the relationship between two objects and how well we understand their connection. We’re able to create this relationship when we combine the use of our prior knowledge with our current behaviors. To quickly recall these relationships, we develop cognitive heuristics, or cultural metaphors. These metaphors reinforce our understanding of the relationship of object and its function.

Some common metaphors you can use to access information on mobile devices are:

Constraints

Restrictions on behavior should be appropriately implemented to eliminate or reduce performance error while laterally accessing content. Consider using the boundaries of the display (edges and corners) during gestural and scroll and select navigation. The edges and corners provide an infinite area to move our fingers or curser over. This can significantly reduce the amount of time to navigate across pages. Consider this effect when using a circular or closed navigation structure.

Patterns for Lateral Access

Using appropriate and consistent lateral access widgets will provide an alternative way to present and manipulate content serially. Within this chapter, the following patterns will be discussed, based on how the human mind organizes and navigates information: