Product Research
Peter Merholz observes people who are trying to select a complex product -- a digital camera, a mutual fund -- and notices that they tend not to proceed in a systematic breadth-first mode. Instead, they plunge deeply into the data, then loop back to glossaries and overviews, then head back to specific products. This is our old friend, the Cycle pattern:
Websites tend to be designed rather rigidly and hierarchically, assuming visitors will be good little shoppers, and get a sense of all the basic concepts first (learn about megapixels, memory cards, battery life), then figure out their specific needs (I need a camera with 3 megapixels, using CompactFlash, that can take 50 pictures on a single charge), then find the products that meet those needs, and then choose one and be done. My observations suggest that the process is in fact much messier, and requires constant re-orientation on the part of the shopper to remember which variables are important and which qualities they want.
This is the real thing: real criticism of real hypertexts! In this case, the hypertexts are the commercial webs we all use every day -- book sites, web stores, weblogs. Very interesting....