My goal was to define a user experience that transitions a "want-to-know" learner into a "need-to-know" learner. This meant figuring out how people are triggered to follow new idea-paths; when they are satisfied with what they've found; and, how they recognize and apply this new knowledge.

I began by conducting exploratory focus groups. I screened for people who are want-to-know learners: people who learn for fun, who read widely and follow disparate paths of information for new understanding. 

All artifacts from this process are lost but one.  While the design of this site was dependant on the conceptual research which indicated that following tangents was the natural "architecture" of lifelong learners, the actual implementation required a lot of usability testing to get right. This excerpt from the usability report (.pdf) shows user responses to this site design and novel architecture.  It took some tweaking to the visual, iconic cues meant to direct users in that virtual reference environment before they could follow the trails easily.  The "trails" architecture of this site reflected the "want-to-know" learners' mode of learning, so that subjects intersected on one article reflecting each of them.  Those thematic "trails" like "18th century Rome" + "Sculptural Art" + "Mythology in Art" all converged on one class subject page. The user could follow any of those trails to another subject-specific class along 3-5 other thematic lines of interest.  This intellectual smorgasbord gave users enough opportunity to explore before choosing one subject toward which to focus attention for a semester-length online class, taught by the international scholar of record, and purchased/facilitated through the site.

The site lives on and is still available at http://www.fathom.com.  However, it has scaled back significantly to offer only a few subjects in brief with access to books and classes.  The scope is 10% of its original size, and so the threads-trails architectural model would be overkill if applied to this same site now.

Alison Andrews * alison@functionlust.com