Pattern 73: Oblique landmarks
AKA: Partial line of sight; disabled irrelevant things (Tidwell)

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View sensitizing image - tbd

You understand WYSIWYCU (70) and the need for users to GO BACK TO A SAFE PLACE (34).

How do you draw attention to features of your site that only usable indirectly or when the user is in a certain state?

Therefore

Provide visual and textual cues to show users what is available on the site. Make it clear what the ‘public buildings’ are.

This pattern is terminal within this language.

Discussion - forces - known uses

There is a theory in architecture known as space syntax (Hillier, 1996) which says that the geometry of spaces affects our reaction to them and thus the way they are used and their usability. Hillier argues that user-friendly cities are those where landmarks are always approached tangentially rather than head one. Also landmarks are often partially visible from some distance. He gives the City of London as one example of an urban area with these properties and Manhattan as its antithesis. Interestingly the City was not planned and Manhattan was. However, you navigate the Manhattan grid successfully by understanding the way the streets are numbered. In the City you don’t even need to know the names of the roads. Our contention here is that user interfaces too should be more like the City than Manhattan.

In conventional GUI design this kind of property is often achieved by greying out menu items that are not currently available but could become so in some future state, giving the user something just visible to work towards.

You can’t easily use ‘greying out’ in current browsers, although some kind of colour change convention is a possibility. The way you name links can also be important. Another way to let people see what just round the corner is a good site map or navigation bar. Important pages are the public buildings of your site; highlight them in some way. In the image above notice how it is clear from its façade that the porticoed building is important in some way: perhaps a museum, basillica or opera house.

When you open a new browser window make this obvious by offsetting it slightly compared to the window that is currently open. In that way the user can see there is a landmark to head back to.

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