museum visitor mobile interface: minimal branching

[Clayton H Lewis]

(from the tuesday iphone phone meeting... the spirit of this and  
other suggestions is to explore interesting extremes in the design  
space on the way to choosing a more sane direction)

rationale: because links are fiddly if not large on the iphone, aim  
to minimize them

concept: most content nodes to have just two links, up and down... up  
goes up in generality from a work to a subtheme, and from a subtheme  
to a theme... down provides more in depth information about the  
current topic (for a node about a specific work, gives more  
background info; for a subtheme or theme, more about that) ... to get  
started there has to be way to get to a specific work... this could  
be done via a search (though typing is bad) or a selection (though it  
would be a big selection)

scenario: visitor is in a gallery and sees a work about which they  
want to learn more... they enter the artist's name and select (if  
necessary) to get the specific work... from the work node they can  
get more and more background by repeatedly following the down  
links... to get more context they use the up links... to move to  
another work they need to do a new search

(violating the spirit of exploring the extreme, one could make more  
generous use of selection in this design to allow movement from a  
theme or subtheme node directly to works in that theme)

Clayton Lewis
Professor of Computer Science
Scientist in Residence, Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities
University of Colorado
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~clayton



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