By Peter Bell

Context Counts - The Importance of the Page Metaphor

Posted At : March 1, 2007 9:56 PM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Pages, Design Patterns, Controllers
When is a resource not just a resource? When its context counts . . .

For some applications an article is just an article and a product is just a product. index.cfm?event=productview&productid=12 is all you need to know exactly what to display.

But in most of the apps I build, just knowing what product to display isn't sufficient information to build my screens. Why? Well, to take a simple example, if a product can be in more than one category and I have category specific cross sells, which cross sells do I display in my secondary content area if I don't know which category I'm in when viewing the product? The naive answer is any or all categories that the product is associated to, but in practice that usually isn't good enough, so I need to know the context of the product to display it correctly.

And this doesn't just go for e-commerce. You might display the same article in both the support and pre-sales sections of your website, but one page should contain an offer for a 30 day free trial while the other should include an upsell to a related product or a discount on a silver support package.

This is why I find for most of the web applications I build, a page metaphor is much more useful than a simple event based approach (yes I know you could just look at the page as being an event, but I find it brings richer associations that better help clients to communicate their requirements in a way that is easy to code).

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No doubt in my mind that clients think in terms of pages. But that raises an interesting question with respect to some of your earlier postings in CMS. My impression was that you were considering the page to be a collection of display regions - containers a la Spectra. From an architectural standpoint, that seems like a fine decomposition. From a CMS standpoint, how do you get your content editors to understand that? I have a hard time getting them to "think backwards" on links - they want to create the link and then the page - the same way they experience it.
# Posted By Edward T | 3/2/07 3:25 PM
Education (which isn't a great answer). I find that I *need* to teach content editors a little bit about cms's because if I just go with the naive metaphor they start with they are never going to be able to create useful sites.

I think the trick is UI stuff. Have a link drop down in your WYSIWYG with an "add new" option. Support quick adds with default values, etc.

All stuff I've done limited work on as I've been focused on core model and framework, but just starting to play with AJAX libs and Flex (going to 360 flex next week) and I think the way you present the conceptual model is really important.

I buy trying to minimize disonance by using cognitive models users have, but sometimes a model is just too limiting so a *little* education is required.
# Posted By Peter Bell | 3/2/07 3:35 PM
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