A Time and A Place [Design Considerations]

(This is in relation to my ongoing Online Wayfinding System project.)

One important aspect that I have to keep in mind is two useful, but different notations of a webpage in the context of our daily online use. A website, obviously, exists whether we visit it or not. When we think of it, we think of its feature as it exists timelessly, we do not think of a single particular visit of it.

The other notation, as can be inferred from the description of the first, is the visited webpage, or less esoterically, our visit to a page in an instance of time. This latter distinction is useful in mapping modular, self-contained sessions.

However, I feel that it is important for a “webpage-visit” to refer to a singular, centralized version of the webpage, according to the first notation I described above. This serves in solving the problem of “what sequence of webpages did I view in this research session?” as well as the problem of “if I start at this webpage, what alternative paths of sequences can I revisit?”

Algorithmically speaking, the singular version of the webpage is a centralized object, whereas each visit to it is an instance of an object.

A design metaphor that I can use is the act of “teleportation.” The mapped instance should have a “teleportation portal,” so to speak, that takes the user to the original, singular room with the references to all contained sessions. From there, the user can, if he so wishes, revisit all relevant sessions that this webpage participated in.

The motivation behind this thread of thinking is that, as a map grows expansive and complex, having a single representation of an online location from which all relevant sessions flow, is visually an overwhelming view. Instead, we can opt for two complementary views that allow the user to see his current traversal, as well as a view that maps his historical explorations into the web, in a singular map.

Alternatively, the singular map can be the start, as an abstracted overview that can be expanded into a focused detailed single map of traversals.