Navigation in Information Spaces

Information workers accomplish their tasks (making decisions, taking actions, and creating new information) by making sense out of large bodies of information. A key part of this activity involves navigating large information spaces, either to accomplish specific sub-tasks or to become more familiar with the information space (which helps with future sub-tasks). Properly designed tools and techniques for navigation can make that experience successful and enjoyable. Poorly designed navigation can make the task impossible. This position paper outlines some key issues in navigation of large information spaces. These issues are described from several points of view, including the user’s basic paradigm for information tasks, various structures of information, and some basic navigation mechanisms.