Proc. of COSIT'97, Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania, October 1997, Springer LNCS 1329, pp. 53-67.
We propose a conceptual user interface metaphor based on the structure of a city. Cities are very complex spatial environments and people are used to navigate cities. They know how to get information and how to reach certain locations, how to make use of infrastructure and so forth. Furthermore cities possess a unique set of navigational infrastructure that lends itself to creating sub-metaphors for navigational tools. A city metaphor makes this existing knowledge about a structured environment available to the user of a computerized information system.
In this paper we first describe properties of future user interfaces (or user interface metaphors) that we think will distinguish them from current systems, like the richness of information or the use of visualizations to show the structure of information spaces and the ability to serve not only a single user but a user community. Then we describe the structure of the information city metaphor, its structuring and navigation metaphors and what we see as it's main advantages and problems.