August 26, 1996

The whole world, it seems, is clucking over the
ferocious clash between Netscape Communications
Corp. and Microsoft Corp. But their rush to carve the
Internet into multimedia fiefs is siphoning energy away
from what should be the goal: to help users and
developers exploit the unique, interactive qualities of
the World Wide Web.

“There’s a strange set of priorities right now,” says
Steven Johnson, editor of the Web magazine Feed, who
thinks that the focus of the two companies is misplaced.
“When people first sit down to a live Web connection, the
experience of ‘this is amazing’ isn’t about the little animated
graphics or flashing text,” he says. “Obviously, it’s the ability
to click on a word and hop across the planet. To link to
different sites is what makes the Web different from everything else.”

But ask anyone who has tried to click his or her way
around a labyrinthine Web site, or who has tried to
maneuver through a CD-ROM. It is painfully obvious that
when you couple interactivity with the sheer volume of
information available, new ways must be found to help
people find the material they want.

The search for these new pathways is attracting a
growing number of disciples to a field called
information design. Viewed by some as a kind of
three-dimensional chess game, information design
recognizes that helping people navigate through the
multiple points of entry and exit of interactive media,
without getting lost, is as critical as creating the
information itself.

Take the Web’s crude hypertext links, for example.
Before you click on a link, there are few hints about
where it will take you. And most of the time you end up
somewhere you did not want to go.

Johnson says that a new series of classifications
for links would thus be a great asset to people
multiple points of entry and using the Web. “The link
is a new form of punctuation, and today
it’s like all we have is a period,” he said.

In other words, Johnson wants Web browsers that allow
publishers to define the links on their sites. That way, when
users touch a link, they could know — without clicking on
it — whether it is connected to a chat room or bulletin board, a
footnote, or a link to a related topic.

Especially important is a way to classify commercial
links. “Today, there’s no way to tell whether a link is
an editorial judgment by someone who likes it, or
whether someone has paid to be there,” Johnson says.

Some information designers, such as Nathan Shedroff, the
creative director for Vivid Studios, an electronic media
design firm in San Francisco, believe such enhancements
would be a giant step toward helping people understand
that interactive media is really about creating
conversations.

Shedroff, who also teaches a course called interaction
design at Stanford University, says most CD-ROMs and Web
sites are even worse than television, the most passive
of media. “At least TV just flows,” he says. “You don’t
have to keep clicking on the screen for more, like a lab
rat clicking for more drugs.”

As an antidote, Shedroff has begun thinking about
improvisational theater as a metaphor for how
interactive media should behave. He says the genius of
improv groups like Theater Sports, which transform
audience suggestions into spontaneous, unique
performances, lies in their ability to generate context.

“They can very quickly wrap a group of strangers
into an experience and get them to come along for the
ride,” said Shedroff, who is researching how to
translate the improv esthetic into the Web context. “If you
can start taking some of these lessons on line, I think we’ll be able to
create better experiences, both people-to-people and
people-to-machine.”

From a design perspective, the ability to create context
can make or break an interactive media product. And the
master of creating context in electronic media today is
Corbis Corp.

Corbis, Bill Gates’ “other company,” has amassed the
world’s largest digital photography archive. But it also
produces some of the most highly acclaimed CD-ROM
titles.

At a recent conference on interactive media, Corbis’
creative director, Curtis Wong, captivated an audience
of industry executives with a title still under
development, called “Leonardo da Vinci.” Part of the
title explores one of Leonardo’s famous notebooks, the
Codex Leicester, that Gates purchased in 1995.

The Codex Leicester, written in Leonardo’s famous
mirror-script code — not to mention medieval Italian –
posed a thorny information design problem: How do you
provide an English-language translation of the text
without making the reader click away from the
manuscript?

So the interface designer for the CD-ROM, Cecil
Juanarena, designed a visual metaphor of breathtaking
simplicity: “a clarifier,” as Corbis calls it, that
looks like the glass bar used to magnify the text of
newspapers or books.

But instead of magnifying, the clarifier translates the
text as it slides down the screen while the image of the
manuscript remains intact all around it. “I thought, ‘I
wish I could see it so I could understand it,’ ” Wong
said. “That’s where the idea came from.”

An electronic glass bar. A better hypertext link. Improv
theater as metaphor. These are the kinds of simple,
elegant ideas that come from people who are obsessed
with making good products, not high-tech hype and
corporate machinations.

Browser wars are irrelevant to the new information
designers. Maybe these people can be an example to those
who truly want to see interactive media reach its
potential.

Denise Caruso