wayfinding

Wayfinding is the process by which a person determines where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there within an environment — physical or informational. The term comes from environmental psychology and urban design, particularly Lynch’s The Image of the City [@lynch_ImageCity_1960], which studied how people navigate cities using mental models built from paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

In information architecture, wayfinding refers to the user’s ability to orient themselves within a website, knowledge base, or document collection. Good wayfinding answers three questions at any point:

1. Where am I? (Breadcrumbs, page titles, visual cues indicating position in the hierarchy.)
2. Where can I go? (Navigation menus, contextual links, related items.)
3. How do I get back? (Browser back button, home link, breadcrumb trail.)

Poor wayfinding produces the experience of being “lost” in a website — unable to find what you came for, unsure how the current page relates to others, or unable to return to a previously visited page. Morville and Rosenfeld discuss wayfinding in detail in their treatment of navigation systems [@morville_InformationArchitectureWorldWideWeb_2006].