The NON-LINEAR ERA: you no longer have to choose, you simply take both roads

We are non-linear people. Multi-taskers. Permanently absent and present. Always going back and forward in search for task conclusion. We take no longer one way to do it, but a combination of many solutions that together result in a more efficient and fastest way to do it. We always wanted it. And we did it already, but scandalously few times.

We are non-linear.
We always were.
But now we can do it all the time.
And so naturally.

Before this digital explosion, the physical world never let us explore that multitude of levels in constant activity and interactivity. Even more at media consumption. Here, more than anywhere else, we were prohibited of doing it the proper way. If you wanted to check about a fact on a newspaper, library and public debate, you had miles, physical ones, and a lot of time, separating them and delaying you. And more, you had to do each one at a separate time and space.

Now you don't.

Getting all the facts

Just remember on how you stay in touch to the world facts. You no longer are confined to the top 3 or 4 big media brands to read all about what's going on. You read several blogs, you read NYT comments to their news article, you take a look at one or two YouTube videos and you participate later on some discussion at one forum or at the MySpace group created for that topic. Sometimes, you have all these web pages open at the same time, and you constantly jump from one to the other, as if they were all books you had, all of them open side by side on your dinner table.

Of course, you don't do this all the time for all the news. It's a matter of involvement. The more interested you are, more intensively and more sources you consult. But you certainly were never able to do things this way before, not even for one single topic.

Friends

And what about your friends? Just rememeber how it used to be: you talked to them, heard about them from word of mouth, a letter or a phone call. That means that two people had to be actively and physically involved at that same instant (ok, except post-its!). You nowadays can add messenger, their blog feed, their flickr or picasa account feed, last.fm songs heard, twitter feed, myspace and hi5 warnings and messages, ... It's almost impossible to lose track of somebody. People cand go along with their lives. That's ok. Because technology and the digital era take care that you have an easier job. Yesterday you could only listen to them. Nowadays you can also keep track of them.

Being different on the same day

When many buy a newspaper at their local shop, many do it in total fidelization to a brand. When you buy a newspaper, you always buy the Wall Street. But still, when these same people go online, they don't. Why? Why on that same day people change so suddenly at their modus operandi for news, data or information?

Because on the web you have a lot less constraints. Or saying it better: on the web you are impulsively pushed to explore.

One newspaper is one click away. And if you use a feed reader, hell, they are at the same spot! So you click and read at the news article or post that better catches your attention. Brands go secondary at the key making decision.

From A to B: no longer a straight road

Going from point A to point B is no longer a straight road. You no longer get stick to a single action. Going online, most of us find ourselves in many times at several levels of activity. Examples:
- multi-tasking
- multiple tabs
- multiple desktops
- multiple avatars (even at the same game, as in WOW or SecondLife)

We like and we need to explore things from several perspectives and at the same time. And why we didn't do them before? Because we were a lot more limited.

Trains and planes take you from points A to B in ways that you can in no possible mean change. But you can take your RangeRover and explore alternative paths, as well as your Timberland shoes and go for a different walk.

But these are occasional acts.
Today, on the web, you can do it in a routinely way.

Websites and the linear to non-linear change

In the beggining, as we all know, there was nothing. Sure. That's how it was back then, when first web pages heired the books style for information consume and navigation: pages and chapters. So for some people, this was it. Of course: hyperlinks immediatly appeared and that changed it all!

Hyperlinks are the birth of the non-linear explosion. You don't need to get to the end of the page to pass to the next one. And so this brings us to the age of today, where you navigate through links on words, tags, feeds and feed agreggators, search, ...

Point B has no longer one single point A - Welcome to the non-linear - Welcome to the birth of page-rank by Google, where the more point A's you get, more popular you are, and more referred you will be.

Even Search is the biggest proof of this non-linear era. No road is the same forever. Paths change all the time. Search engines crawl for correlations, associations and consistency, and serve the results each day differently. You may search for "sexy babes" on Google today, but each day you get different results, mostly observed after page one. Same thing goes for YouTube and their "related videos" right box when you're watching a video.

So whenever you build a website, have that in mind: people are not the same. They share different genetic codes, different life experiences, and so they will behave differently. Sure, this all resumes to a few patterns. That's ok. And yes, you can fight this. Why not? You may reduce the number of point A's to get to your point B's. You wanna change the world this way? Don't you think that all you'll get is a clear way to make your content become forgotten?

Populate, populate, populate

Take a look at your Pageviews vs. Visits stats. Benchmark your website and see if in anyway you are behind of what people need. Take a special look at the "new visitors".

As Jakob Nielsen noted back on some usabilty books (I'm remembering the one shared with Hoa Loranger), new visitors spend more time at their first visits, clicking and reading more, and then, with time, focus more on specific content. So take a look at that data and search for patterns. Where are they different from your current users? Try to identify new navigation needs and see if you can or must include them.

For the same point B, experience tells me that at least 3 major point A's must exist. Search is, of course, the top of them (both Google and your own website search). Begin there, but don't end it there.

Use directories, tagging, feeds, widgets, banners, reccomended's, related's, etc. Improve your website and your internal links and navigation, but even more important than that: improve it out of it.

Labels: debate, HCI, resources, SEO, tagging, usability, visual-display-information, web