The Dream of a More Human Navigation Realized

Published on Boxes & Arrows – October 5, 2021

Creating more human navigation by using the customer intentions method.

In the 2010 Sci-Fi film Inception a professional thief is offered a chance at erasing his criminal history if he implants one person’s ideas into the subconscious of another person. He aims to do this by crashing the second person’s dreams. He hires a graduate architecture student to design the dreamscapes.

To design each space of the dream, she must align with the thief/dream crasher’s need to easily and intuitively move about the dream in order to implant another’s ideas into the dreamer’s subconscious.

This architect’s job was not very different from ours as Information Architects. She designed virtual spaces to meet the intentions of those using them.

So we asked ourselves, what if each page of a website was a metaphor for a real-life space? What if each page of said website had to help someone meet their intention? And, what if our websites had more human navigation?

This line of questioning inspired us to develop the Designing for Customer Intentions method. In Part I of this series, Forget the Trail of Breadcrumbs, we explained the concept and method in general terms. We continue here with “How.”

Read the entire article

For more on the subject, check out these ideas:

Diana Sonis:
What is Website Navigation

Diana Sonis:
How to Talk With Customers Through Your Website

Diana Sonis:
Designing Website Navigation for Customer Intentions