Documents as places

The idea that documents are places is embedded in our language. We speak of losing our place, returning to the home page, or locating an idea. And there’s business jargon such as the user journey.

Reading a new document is not unlike visiting a building for the first time – say, a supermarket.

You go through stages:

• identify the store (or text)
• find the starting point or way in
• identify it as conforming to a known pattern or genre (it’s a supermarket so fresh produce is usually near the door).
• think about how to use it (which may be highly goal-directed or which may start by browsing)
• make inferences about the location of elements (will I find nuts with snacks or in the baking section?)
• get help from an index, a map, a signage system or a human guide.

It’s not just about functionality, though. Landscape architects and garden designers talk about spiritus loci – the spirit of a place – and they design environments that are sympathetic to it and pleasant to be in. As information designers we can be quite clinical at times, so can learn from this.

This brings to mind one of Arnold Lund’s usability guidelines: ‘the user should be in a good mood when done’.¹

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1. Arnold M Lund (1997) Expert ratings of usability maxims Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications 5(3):15-20

Andrew Barker (2018) wrote an interesting PhD thesis comparing people’s use of places and documents: A comparison of seeking-finding behaviours across the contexts of environmental space, paper documents, and on-screen
PhD thesis, University of Reading

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