Social Navigation: browsing like ants

We are influenced by others in everything we do. Our behavior in the Web is no exception. As noted by Dieberger et al. [1], however, most of the Web sites are not designed to support this kind of social behavior. They coined a term "social navigation" to describe navigation that is informed by the actions of others.

Dieberger et al. discuss that we often utilize social navigation in the physical world [1]. Similar behavior can also be observed in other species. In particular, ants use this kind of navigation pattern to find food around the nest, following pheromone trails left by other ants. The analogy is well described by van den Berg et al. [2]:

"The ability of ants to find efficient (i.e. short) routes between nests and food sources suggests an approach to cost-effective, flexible and implementable wayfinding support. Paths identified by ants are not pre-planned, but emerge, spontaneously, as a result of indirect communication between members of an ant colony - a form of indirect social navigation."

It seems reasonable that social navigation should be supported by design, as it simplifies our decision making. For example, it is easier to find interesting books in Amazon based on the recommendations.

However, I'm a bit concerned by this in some scenarios. Should we really design Web services that try to guide our decisions to match the decisions made by others? Taken to the extreme, are we becoming ants that just follow the footsteps of others? Making some decisions is difficult, and sometimes design should reflect that. So let's design for "individual navigation" that encourages users to think for themselves.



[1] A. Dieberger, P. Dourish, K. H\&\#246;\&\#246;k, P. Resnick, and A. Wexelblat. 2000. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. Interactions 7, 6 (November 2000), 36-45. DOI=10.1145/352580.352587 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/352580.352587

[2] Bert Van den Berg, Rene Van Es, Colin Tattersall, Jose Janssen, Jocelyn Manderveld, Francis Brouns, Hub Kurvers, and Rob Koper. 2005. Swarm-based Sequencing Recommendations in E-learning. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA '05). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 488-493. DOI=10.1109/ISDA.2005.88 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISDA.2005.88