A City Metaphor to Support Navigation in Complex Information Spaces

A major problem for users of modern information systems is the retrieval of new and previously viewed information from the system. Systems like the Word-Wide Web are heavily interlinked but do not communicate structure that helps users to navigate the information it contains. The use of appropriate navigation metaphors can help to make the structure of modern information systems easier to understand, and therefore, easier to use. We propose a conceptual user interface metaphor based on the structure of a city. Cities are very complex spatial environments and yet, people are used to navigating within cities. They know how to get information, how to reach particular destinations, and how to make use of the infrastructure. Furthermore, cities possess a unique set of navigational tools that lend themselves to creating sub-metaphors. A city metaphor makes this existing knowledge about a structured environment available to the user of a computerized information system. In this paper, we first describe properties of future user interfaces (or user interface metaphors) that we think will distinguish them from current systems, like the richness of information or the use of visualizations to show the structure of information spaces, and the ability to serve not only a single user, but a user community. Then we describe the structure of the information city metaphor, its structuring and navigation metaphors, and what we see as its main advantages and disadvantages.