Crosstown Traffic: transportation theory & image search
Mathematician Dieter Braess of the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, is a pioneer of a unique theory in network design: it's one that says when all the moving things on that network logically look for the most efficient route possible, adding more network capacity can actually have the paradox effect of reducing the overall network efficiency. What this means in cases of complex transportation issues like solving Manhattan's traffic problems, is that in some cases actually removing routes can improve efficiency in getting people from point A to point B. A successful instance of this took place recently in Seoul, Korea recently, when city planners removed a six-lane highway and replaced it with an 8KM long park. The paradoxical result: the city's traffic flow improved greatly.
In the case of image search, we are presenting a website to clients who need to navigate based on a variety of semantic cues, such as thumbnail images, keywords, categories, and the web pages themselves. Everyone is trying to get to their destination in as short a route as possible, and will naturally congregate on the main thoroughfares of the site:
Homepage > Left at Keyword Search > Right at Image A > Right at Image B > Left at Image C > Straight to Shopping Cart > Straight to Download
In it's current form, Zymmetrical's 'streets' could be described as a relatively barren, compared to many of the common signals present on stock agencies: we have no view counters, download counters, prices, artist ranking, file ranking, and other such minutiae of info presented readily to the visitor. It's a big pile of info for the client (driver) to absorb as they make their merry way around the site (city), but the traditional school of thought has been 'the more info and pages the better, the clients can sort it out based on their tastes'.
Studies in Northern Europe, where shared streets are very common, indicate improved traffic flow and safety when traffc lights, street markings, and divisions between streets, bicycle ways, and sidewalks are actually reduced. Removing these indicators and conceptual divisions, has the strange effect of actually increasing the traffic efficiency and reduces problems. People are forced to slow down and actually look at whats going on - eye contact with that nervous old lady at the crosswalk suddenly comes naturally, instinctively.
Of course, in a website context, one visitors path to getting what they came for will not be really relevant to others using the system at the same time - it's a lonely route which is thankfully free of honking and fender-benders. That being said it's still a very important thing for our own community here at Zymmetrical that we deliver a user experience that is a bit different than normal. We don't want a 'traffic calmed' suburban neighbourhood of blind, slow sameness, but we definitely want the creatives who source content from us to feel able to slow down and absorb the content the artist's present, without the usual indicators, signs and warnings that may be present in a typical 'stock website'.
'This file has been downloaded 4433 times - Dead End!!' - well, it may not be a dead-end if you are making a brochure to promote a local seniors center, if the tree has fallen in the woods they will not hear it because the 4433 times the file has been purchased has no bearing whatsoever on a self-contained consumer group. Presenting data like that to a potential client is like throwing up more traffic lights - subjective limitation info that can have the paradoxical effect of making a clients route to their creative destination just that much more complex.
A stock agency can be paralleled to a cities transportation infrastructure in many ways: a big variety of visitors with a lot of goals, a lot of stuff to see and do, and a limited amount of real estate for everyone to get around accomplishing their goals in. Our number one goal at Zymmetrical is to provide a clean and fast little community for clients to get to their destination - today's project.
If you have a new idea as to how we can improve the daily commute, just drop it in our Idea Exchange. Other members can vote and comment on your suggestions, and we definitely take notice.
