HCI Project: Battling a website

I’ve been thinking about ideas for an HCI project and have a few ideas for my own project (more on that in another post). I have been sitting and had another (I think great) idea for a full on HCI project.

My idea is given in bullet points below:

  • Your site is parsed and a tree is made up of the site
  • A 3D map is made up of your site (with rooms representing pages and corridors representing links)
  • All the information given on each page is put somewhere in each room
  • A quake/doom/… style character is spawned and you can start ‘browsing’ the site starting from the index
  • Highly linked pages are easy to find whereas lowly linked pages will have less corridors leading to them and thus are harder to find
  • Information on the pages, stored in the corresponding room, can be used to allow access to other rooms

This allows the user to have a real walk through their site, looking at the information on each page. Perhaps links in the content can direct the user down a corridor or will open the door to that corridor allowing them to travel to the linked page.

Goals could be to browse the whole site or to find a very remote page, perhaps battling HTML/XHTML/PHP/Javascript errors as monsters or solving puzzles to access parts of the site, a community of sites could build up different maps which when linked would allow a user to jump from one site to another and start exploring that.

A very basic idea, but it would be fun to see if anyone could (or would ever bother) to do it.
- Chris

  • http://iain-simpson.org Iain Simpson

    Sounds cool, if not rather a large amount of work.

    I saw something once that gave you a 3D representation of your file system in DOOM style. Each file was a cylinder, with larger files being bigger and taller, colours depeniding on type and permissions. Needless to say, you got a gun. That would be one sitation that I’d be extremely wary of using a BFG 9000…