Web pages are dying. Organized into websites with navigation and keyword search in the same way that printed pages were organized into books with a table of contents and an index, web pages and their book-like metaphor are a throwback to the past. In the future, our interactions with information will be less like flipping through a book, and more like exploring a museum, navigating a city, or wandering through nature itself. In other words, we are entering a new era of information wayfinding.

Fortunately, the fields of wayfinding and human-information interaction can teach us a good deal about how people find their way through physical and information environments alike. In this forward-looking talk Tyler Tate, author of Designing the Search Experience and cofounder of Twigkit, begins by synthesizing ideas from each of these fields. He then combines this cross-fertilization of ideas with a set of design principles for creating successful information wayfinding experiences, including:

1. Unified interaction

2. Positional cues

3. Survey views

4. Paths onward

5. A path back to known territory

Most importantly, Tyler then turns the theory in practice by demonstrating hands-on techniques that can be applied to your current project, such as: moving from navigation to faceted navigation, using human-readable URLs, offering flexible controls, providing contextual search, using integrated breadcrumbs effectively, providing topic views, and offering onward-leading detail views.

As web pages increasingly become a thing of the past, users require new means of interacting with an ever-expanding landscape of information. Welcome to the era of information wayfinding.