Niagara Falls, Maps, and Information

For the last part of our "vacation" (before starting the long driving part of the moving experience), we went to Niagara Falls. (I'll post pictures when I have a system that can talk to my camera.) We stayed on the US side, but maybe we'll go back in a few years to see everything from the Canadian side. The Falls were beautiful (as I suspect they always are). There was a lot of water going over the Falls, and we were told that there is more water now (Spring) because of the ice melting from Winter. It was quite warm there, but the cold spray from the Falls felt very nice.

When you stay on the US side, there are some very nice walking paths from the American Falls to the Horseshoe Falls. Those paths have maps along them that show you where you are, and the paths between the various viewpoints and other interesting locations. Of course, the maps do not explicitly say "go left to see the American Rapids" (for example). Instead, the maps assume that, if you know where you are ("You are here") and you can see the end point on the map, then you can determine your own path to get there. This, of course, got me to thinking about how we write information products. Shouldn't we be able to do the same thing? Instead of having to write in a very elementary fashion "Step 1: Do this. Step 2: Do that. Step 3: Do another thing." and so on, wouldn't it be nice if the user could, given a map, follow his own path through the various steps to get to the end point? Sure, there are some issues that we would need to resolve (dependencies, for example), but this could be an interesting approach.

Posted at 07:34PM May 30, 2007 by jcinfoblog in General  |  Comments[0]