What's wrong with the Web

You're working on Microsoft's project to put a Web browser in Windows. Tell us about that.
The whole user experience just isn't that fun. Ninety percent of what the user sees is not designed by the user interface designers at the browser company, so you better make sure that the 10 percent that's left over is right. The navigation tools that we're familiar with today are getting a little stale and they aren't that useful.

My biggest complaint about the Web is it's very page-based. I feel like a voyeur looking through keyholes. I start at the table of contents, dip into an article, come back to the table of contents, but the representation gives me no idea of where I really am, no way to navigate the landscape. I can only go backwards and forwards but can never see where I'm going or where I've been. So this linear representation of history is very obscure. I find it very confusing. And I can't imagine the average user out there has any idea what to do with it. The Web is so big; there's no sense of context. You have to have a sense of context, a sense of where you are. The user interface does not support that. That's one thing.

The other big problem is we are trying to map what we are familiar with, which is icons and folders--a hierarchy on to the Web. That makes no sense at all because I can't even manage a gigabyte drive, much less the entire Web. Hierarchies map fairly well only to a couple hundred megabytes.

I actually find myself searching (the Web) much more than I ever find myself trying to manage the data at a conceptual level. Like, I don't usually go to a site and then traverse the site. I'd much rather search it. So my browser doesn't open to Netscape. I'm sorry they don't get their ad revenue from me. It's actually Alta Vista because I love to just search. That's how I usually navigate. Flat text search is pretty crude. So I think there's a lot of room there to improve searching. If you look at what the Excite folks are doing, I think there's a lot of interesting things there. So, sense of context, and how do you navigate around, I think are two big problems.

How will you solve those problems?
Well, you can read between the lines of what I just said. You get rid of this feeling that you're looking through a keyhole at one page at a time. And also let's take advantage of the fact that screens are getting bigger. The typical machine and typical Web sites are set for 800 pixels wide now and they're getting bigger.

And if you have 800 pixels for the article, it turns out that you don't want to make things much wider than that, because then you get into legibility problems. It's actually hard to read a foot wide piece of text, especially when it's set in 14 point Times Roman or whatever most Web sites are. So, if you want to have that wide expanse you can either go to multiple columns or narrow it up, and then you suddenly have a third of your screen you can use for some navigational aids. And maybe you can do something that gives users a sense of context and lets them understand what history is, lets them understand what favorites are. So instead of turning these into linear menus, maybe there is a metaphor that gives the user a sense of place and let them navigate stuff and not be so confused by it.

It's kind of like you need an Alta Vista search engine for your bookmarks after awhile. I periodically throw out the sites I haven't visited. That's something the browser could do. The browser can sit there and say, "You know, you haven't visited this in a while." It's like an aging. And conversely, it notices you go to a bookmark everyday, why not just do a PointCast-type-thing and just start giving it to you, or a freeloader-type-thing where it says "Hey, I noticed you go to this every day, why don't I greet you with this?" And I think there's a lot of opportunities there.

We just spent the last decade convincing people that typing filenames is stupid--à la DOS--and now here we are typing things that are worse than filenames. Walter Smith (a former Newton team member who followed Capps to Microsoft) pointed out that unfortunately people might expect to see "www" now. It becomes kind of an iconic tag that says, "Here is a Web site." So, even if we wanted to get rid of it, we may not be able to. So as you're driving down 101, you see on a billboard, www.bofa.com. You kind of say, "Oh, that's a Web site." So the www actually may outlive its usefulness in terms of the technical reason for navigating to a certain site, but people may keep it around just because it's a way of saying, "Hey, I'm a Web address." You know, it's shorthand to say "visit us at the Web." The UI (user interface) is ready to crash and burn. So like I said, let's try to sneak a new paradigm in before people get calcified in what they expect from browsing.

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