Zooming page navigation

Let’s be honest. I’m not the biggest of fans of Microsoft. Their commercial software is bloated, slow and suffers from severe featuritis.

That being said, not everything they do is bad. Their Labs work has, on occasion, peaked my interest. Unfortunately most of what I like is not likely to turn into a commercially viable (and affordable) product for some time.

A while ago I came across a demo of PhotoSynth an offshoot of research by Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research). The main commercial appeal of the application is its ability to reconstruct spatial relations from a set of pictures. What peaked my interest however was its ability to infinitely zoom in, something it inherited from SeaDragon. This aspect is beautifully demonstrated in the demo.

The ability to navigate information by visually zooming in and out of it has always had a certain appeal to me. Two aspects of this are particularly inviting: loose understanding of hierarchy; visual representation of the information being accessed. Personally I’ve always had issues with constrained navigation.

Text based, hierarchical menus provide little insight as to what is actually “beyond” what’s being displayed. These types of navigation schemes emphasize “reading” and “understanding” rather than “context” and “impression”. Both schemes have their applications and will work better under certain circumstances. I won’t even pretend to know which applies best where. What I have noticed is that web design sites (amongst others) tend stand out by their innovative navigation schemes.

One of the sites with a novel navigation schema is schematic.com. Their navigation scheme applies some of the concepts I found so appealing in PhotoSynth while retaining hierarchical understanding. Zooming in and out of individual pages, while at the same time still retaining the visual impression of all the pages in the site was a wonderful user experience.

Hopefully there will be more such sites in the future.