User:69.243.96.8

Bad Use of 3D I want to talk about the usage of 3d and how to 2d is sometimes better to use instead of a 3d to me. Most abstract information spaces work poorly in 3D because they are non-physical. If anything, they have at least a hundred dimensions, so visualizing an information space in 3D means throwing away 97 dimensions instead of 98: hardly a big enough improvement to justify the added interface complexity. In particular, navigation through a hyperspace (such as a website) is often very confusing in 3D, and users frequently get lost. 3D navigation looks very cool in a demo, but that's because you are not flying through the hyperspace yourself. Thus, you don't have to remember what's behind you or worry about what remote objects are hidden by near-by objects. The person giving the demo knows where everything is (the first law of demos: never try to actually use the system for anything; simply step through a well-rehearsed script that does not touch anything that might cause a crash). Avoid virtual reality gimmicks (say, a virtual shopping mall) that emulate the physical world. The goal of Web design is to be better than reality. If you ask users to "walk around the mall", you are putting your interface in the way of their goal. In the physical world, you need to schlep between shops; on the Web you teleport through cyberspace directly to your destination using a navigational topology that conforms to user needs (assuming good information architecture, of course).