I’ve always believed that the Web is a willful beast. And, I’ve often used the metaphor of drawing a pig in clay to explain that view. Stick with me.

About 5,000 years ago the Sumerians invented a form of writing called cuneiform. It looks like they made drunken, miniature geese walk back and forth across wet pavement. In fact, what they did was press the business end of a triangular reed into soft clay and then baked the clay into tablets the consistency of the Purity biscuits so beloved by Newfoundlanders.

Cuneiform was a refinement of early proto-writing pictographs. Why the shift? Lots of reasons, economy of symbols was one, but an important reason was that it was faster to write in wedge-symbols than it was to try to draw a pig, sheep or ox image in clay. Try it yourself. The clay bunches up around the stylus, clogs the channel you’re cutting and generally make a nuisance of itself. The clay is being willful and is rejecting the content (pictograms) that are inappropriate for it.

The hive mind of the Web is the same way. It rejects content that does not create community. It rejects broadcast in favour of conversation. It favours diffuse authorship and collaboration.

Well, devices have the same willfulness about user interface. For example, broadsheet newspapers are a technology that depends on the relative placement, shape and type size of page elements to create an effective interface. The front page of a newspaper telegraphs editorial judgment by where a story is played, how big its headline/picture is and what stories, if any, are nearby. A double page spread inside a paper uses this principle even more expansively.

Computer monitors, until recently, have lacked the spaciousness and capriciousness of newspapers. As a result, most websites depend on vertical scrolling and hyperlinks to provide proximity, juxtaposition and discovery.

Mobile devices, like cellphones, with their tiny screens, have relied on RSS feeds, short stories and the vertical scrolling of narrow columns to provide snack-sized info nuggets. When they display webpages most do so with the functionality of a loupe applied to a gravestone.

But, now we are moving to a new kind of mobile interface: a screen that is small but has the ability to pan, zoom and pull back. A screen that can slip, slide and tilt around an image or virtual environment at the command of a gimbaling wrist. And, a screen that is attached to a device that has built in GPS and is geo-locatable.

For now the poster child of that kind of interface is the Apple iPhone, but soon many other mobile devices, many running on Google’s Android platform, will have the same functionality. So, what kind of user interface suits that kind of device? Or, to put it another way, what kind of content navigation will that medium embrace?

I think the answer is: navigation based on time and space. Consider the mapping features of the photosharing site, flickr. Using it, you can search for photos taken at specific places in the world. Here’s a map of pictures of frogs taken in Southern Ontario, for example.

Each of those photos was “geo-tagged” by photographers who either pinpointed the image on a map by hand, entered the exact latitude or longitude or, more commonly these days, imported images into flickr that that the position information baked right into them thanks to their camera’s GPS chip or Bluetooth linked GPS device.

Second example, here’s a timeline I created of all rabble podcast networks podcasts and rabbletv You Tube videos that have been created in the last few months. I used a site called dipity which allows place a single RSS feed or a collection of RSS feeds on a timeline.

You can zoom in and out on the timeline and scroll back and forth across time. So, if you remember that rabble.ca posted a video about three weeks ago, you can just flip back in time and find it easily.

Now, let’s put the two together. This is a timeline of flickr photos of frogs in Ontario, this time with the pictures also pinpointed on a map.

Now you can find the frog pictures in time and in space.

Now, imagine you arrive at an Ontario provincial park with a mobile device like an iPhone. You call up a map of the park that shows you available sites, where the comfort stations are and which maps out all the trails. You then search on “wildflowers” and pictures appear pinpointed on the map with a timeline. Tilting the phone left and right lets you scroll through the timeline of all the pictures taken by fellow campers in the park you’re about to visit. And, yes, it turns out you’re not too late to photograph the Lady Slippers, which are most abundant off the Trail Six near the lake.

You get the idea. I think we’re going to see more news, information and online community sites using this kind of interface. It makes sense. You don’t want to be stuck trying to design for an increasing mobile Web by drawing a pig in clay.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...