Jim Regan - Site Reviews
Explorations in Navigation --
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"Right at the corner, third left after that, second building on your left after the gas station."
"44 degrees North Latitude, 63 degrees West Longitude."
We have a variety of methods at our disposal when we need to get from A to B - some more efficient than others, some impossible without special equipment. Not surprisingly, given the nature of this column, a similar variety exists when navigating within various websites. And while the vast majority of sites use familiar lists, menus and index bars to help you move around, a few choose to make things, if not more efficient, at least more entertaining. Two such sites are Squidsoup and Mr Noodlebox.
Squidsoup (fortunately, not a cooking site) makes its intentions clear on the welcome page. The site is designed to blur the "... boundaries between navigation and content, exploring the feel and texture of interactive animations that double as a navigational system."
Got that? Well, if the statement doesn't put a very clear image into your mind, understanding can come from experience.
Click the enter button, and Squidsoup will load an interactive, animated index page. (Shockwave/Flash is required, and if your cursor doesn't happen to be over the left half of the window, you might not think much has changed.) Mousing over the left half of the page will cause...ah, blobs, to appear -- blobs that float around the screen and come into sharper focus with proximity to the cursor.
This is the first of Squidsoup's alternative navigation systems -- three of these blobs are labelled, and will take you deeper into the site. More alternative approaches can be found in the Playroom's exhibits, (indexed with a slightly different floating links system) which include a QuickTime panorama, interactive streaming audio, a sisyphean snowball, and navigational tools resembling binoculars and a flashlight's beam.
The second site, Mr Noodlebox (also not a cooking site) states clearly on its info page that it is not "some kind of 'experimental' interface site ... not about 'concept' or experiment, it's about pleasant amusement."
True to the intro, most of Mr Noodlebox is made of Shockwave diversions -- the result, its designer says, is errors, mistakes and "bad judgement while working too late." Nevertheless, the interface used to access those diversions is quite unique. After a few introductory images, the visitor reaches the index page -- a 3-D image of a pair of buildings, made with building blocks (or noodleboxes?).
Mousing over each block reveals the name of a Shockwave animation linked to it, (Kaleidoscope, Lava Lamp, Tunnel, etc.) while double clicking launches the entertainment. Nothing terribly unusual yet, but by clicking and dragging the blocks, the visitor can re-arrange them, moving those in front to reveal, and gain access to, more options underneath and behind the original set. Additionally, for visitors who might lose track of where they've been with all that shuffling around, each link shows a visited/not visited status on mouseover.
Neither of these sites will take up a great deal of your time, they're diversions, where style and/or fun is more important than efficiency. And while it might be difficult to justify chasing floating balls around to survey a news or reference site, other applications do suggest themselves.
Noodlebox's building-block approach could be an engaging way to navigate a site for a museum or archeological dig. Squidsoup's binocular metaphor could be more widely used, as a refreshing alternative to pull-down menus. In the meantime, we can benefit from the experiments, and spend a few minutes exploring new ways to explore.
Squidsoup is at http://www.squidsoup.com/. Mr Noodlebox is at http://www.amaze.co.uk/noodlebox.
Jim Regan provides 'Today's Links' to the e-Monitor. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.