Most People Are Not Trained In Geology

Good direction for creating website navigation as applied to Office 12 ...

"One of the tenets of the Office 12 user interface is that we don't want people to have to look "under rocks."

I don't know why we say "under rocks." Maybe I made it up, maybe I heard it somewhere, who knows. The picture I get in my head is an insect-eating animal crossing the land, turning over rocks to look for meals. Occasionally, a rock will be hiding a juicy insect. Most times, however, there's nothing under the rock. As a result, the animal spends most of his day looking under rocks.

In a user interface, a "rock" is anything you have to click to see what's under it. The more rocks you have to look under, the harder it is to find what you're looking for efficiently. When you have a UI with a lot of rocks to look under, people start to feel like your program is very complex. It's like the shell game--people start forgetting what rocks they've looked under and which they haven't. Eventually, people give up ever looking for new things and instead just use the same three rocks they always use."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Lookiing Under The Rocks.