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January '05: Menu
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Permeable Portals: Designing congenial web sites for the e-societyRichard Coyne, John Lee and Martin ParkerPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version In human-computer interface design, people talk of the mouse click as offering resistance. Some think that in a good web design you should be no more than 3 clicks from the information you seek. The mouse click presents a binary threshold condition. You cannot linger on a click as you can in a doorway. Perhaps the hyperlinked text string or button is the threshold, a place of anticipation. As for a closed door, there is some promise, an opportunity to assess risk: will the click open a new window or a new frame? Will it clutter the screen? Will I be able to hit the return button to get back? The page is a space, but perhaps it is just a threshold. The information is the target, and the page is just a means of getting access to it. By this reading all that the web presents is thresholds. The web page is the shop counter, the ticket box, the interface, and the space beyond is the butter in the fridge, being in Paris, the bouquet of flowers in a vase. The first or front page in a hierarchically structured web site is also a major point of admission and resistance. Sometimes it is a shop front, a billboard, a welcome mat, that encourages or impedes progress. The most conspicuous portal device is that of the login and password, where progress is impeded further by the necessity to register, invent a name, think of a password, fill in a form, disclose personal details, sometimes without knowing what uses will be made of them (fig. 2). 
Fig. 2: The password as conspicuous threshold The boast is that this ritual provides access to a community. Once you are a member you have free access to its resources. This is a very impermeable threshold, providing very little in the way of glimpses to what is inside, or a place to linger. WebCT technologies provide such portals for student access to learning resources. But it is sometimes highly desirable for prospective clients (students) to gain access to lectures (in whole or in part), student work and internal communications. We have developed our own simple permeable portal, which provides access to work in progress, message boards, and a newsletter (fig. 3). It entails risks, in that anyone from outside can intrude on the message boards and place and delete messages. After operating this site for eight months, we have not found any invasion from the outside. As an active site it will be interesting to see what means of regulation emerge if this happens. At the moment we are too cautious to provide unlimited access to all lecture notes, so we have password protection. Outsiders can see parts of certain documents but need to email us for the password to see the texts in their entirety. 
Fig. 3: Work-in-progress site, with images and messages generated by the user community. Image by Colin Calnan. Our students have also experimented with strategies for permeable access to potentially sensitive material, such as their own designs, databases of online registrants, imagined product lines, and communications within the group. Database applications such as ColdFusion provide high level control of web information in database formats. Data can be inserted into and retrieved from a database and is displayed as HTML web pages by the ColdFusion server, complete with interactive components, forms and images. Though online databases are rigorously formal entities with firewalls to control access, they also provide a simple means of establishing communication that has few restrictions. For example, the content of a form on a web page filled in by anyone on the web can then be displayed as database content on a web page. We use this as the basis of our message board that is accessible to anyone with a web browser. 3. The web page as giftSo far we have presented a simple exercise in the idea of permeability across a digital threshold. The literary theorist, Lewis Hyde has related the issue of threshold directly to commerce [9]. Ancient cities were characterised by various gateways and levels of permeability. The inner reaches of the city, perhaps in the sanctity of the domestic sphere or the temple precinct, were characterised by certain freedoms, a generous sociability. At the gate of the city control is more vigorous, driven by the imperative to exclude invaders. Commerce, trade and the harsh rule of law take place at the gate of the city. The inner sanctum, the hearth, the altar is the preserve of the gift. The sociality of the web has been described as participation in the culture of the gift. There is the celebrated case of the development of the Linux operating system by teams of programmers working voluntarily and without payment, often in isolation [10]. Open source software participates directly in this culture. In terms of the metaphor of the city it extends the city to global dimensions. The gate of the city is pushed further and further from the hearth, or perhaps the hearth assumes global dimensions. But even in the realm of Internet commerce the gift can be in evidence. Traces of the gift are ubiquitous in commerce [11]. A site that gives nothing away, that does not participate at least in part in the gift culture of the Internet is unlikely to win the trust of consumers. The question for web design is not just “what are you selling?” but “what does your site give away?” — information, service, the pleasure of browsing, directness, instantaneity, anonymity? Our students explored the gifts of free information, news, images and interactive maps in their project work. The imperative was to create a web site that would also entail the potential for an income stream, which involves the tantalizing game of giving in order to elicit interest and possibly a sale. But even the processes of buying and selling can participate in the trappings of the gift, as we think of the incorporation of the financial transaction in a kind of game, or adding the gift of an extra service to the purchase, such as organizing transportation to a performance venue on purchase of a ticket (or vice versa) (fig 4). The web already purports to offer a rich cornucopia of information and opportunities, as a gift. To mix a metaphor, the web is also suggestive of a rich flow that we can tap into, or a seam to be mined. 
Fig. 4: A site that offers the gift of a transportation service. Work by Allan Henderson, Francesca Matera and Mitra Abrahams. Footnotes9. Hyde, L., 1983. Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Random House, New York.: Hyde 1998, op. cit. return 10. Torvalds and Diamond, op. cit. return 11. Godbout, J.T., 1998. The World of the Gift. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. return | |