If you need a new website, ask a 16th century Swiss naturalist

Whenever I start a new website project — whenever I pitch a new website project — I always go big on the importance of "discovery". This sounds vaguely like a transcendental meditation exercise, though the sad reality is it's much closer to what lawyers mean when they say "discovery": the gathering together of as much pertinent information as possible, so that you can build the most logical and complete finished product.

Website discovery can take a lot of different forms, but every project I've ever worked on, across two different digital agencies, has included something called a card sort. Card sorts can take a lot of different forms too, but the basic process is that you put together a list of all the pages your website currently has (or needs to have), write them all down, and then:

Cut the material into loose slips that can be stored in bundles [...] and rearranged as needed until the proper order is reached... [Keep] the slips fully mobile, so they [can] be moved around indefinitely, and sorted in different ways.

Once every page belongs to a coherent group, and there are minimal (if any) orphaned pages left over, give each of the resulting groups a name, and you pretty much have the navigation menu for your website.

Except, believe it or not, the description of the process quoted above is from "Information in Early Modern Europe" by Ann Blair, in the book Information: A Short History (p.106), and it's describing how a 16th century Swiss naturalist named Conrad Gessner went about making topical indexes to allow readers to navigate very large books — a pretty innovative approach, for the time.

Gessner's use of "mobile paper slips" — we use sticky notes today — was far from the only thing he had in common with the people who make websites. In fact, it's really mind-boggling to read what many of the 16th century's most learned intellectuals had to say about the sudden explosion of information brought about by cheap paper and the printing press.

There's this, a description of the internet if ever I heard one:

A broad cross section of the educated articulated a concern about what we would call "information overload" — the sense that there were too many books for an individual to read and master. Complaints about an overabundance of books became a well-worn refrain... and were used to justify any number of postures: railing about the base commercial motives of printers who produced whatever sold without a care for quality or intellectual merit, mocking the vanity of bookish learning, worrying about the end of civilisation from too many people writing (bad) books and no one reading good ones anymore, or on the contrary worrying that authors with new ideas would be discouraged from writing by the mass of what already existed. (p.97-98)

Or here's a discussion of Wikipedia:

While they were aware of the merits of identifying their sources, their practice of citation was principally designed to make unusual information more convincing or to provide the evidence available in cases where conflicting information from different sources needed to be weighed (leaving the final judgment to the reader)... Most early modern compilations were driven by the supply of information from their sources rather than systematic enquiry. (p.103)

But, to go back to the sticky notes, nowhere were 16th century intellectuals more like 21st century content strategists than in their struggles with how to organise information:

Whatever the order chosen for the text of a large informational book, one or more alphabetical indexes provided the most predictable kind of access. Erasmus drew up... not only an index of adages by opening words, but also an index according to 257 topics... But he and others were aware of a basic problem with topical indexing: that the same concept could occur under different keywords or headings. (p.104)

Indeed, "the problem of heading choice," as Blair puts it, is figuratively and literally its own cottage industry these days, with thousands of work-from-home digital strategists like me spread around the globe, an army of modern-day Erasmuses, paid good money to offer sage advice on whether that About Us section in your site navigation should really be called "About Us" or actually called "What We Do" — as well as what sorts of pages you should put in that section, and whether you should really have that section at all.

Even modern user experience (UX) features like tooltips, or pop-up messages to help you explain how to use a website, are only superficially different from what those 16th century compendia were already doing:

Indexes in the sixteenth century opened with explanatory blurbs for readers who might not be familiar with how to use them. (p105)

...though you'd probably be hard pressed today to find a UX designer who'd sign off on this kind of user "hint":

"If things do not occur under one heading, look for them under a synonym." (p105)

That is, perhaps, one thing that's different about modern web design versus 16th century compendia: back then, information design was approached information first, whereas today you're much more likely to find UX driving decision-making. Erasmus would never get away with 257 topic headings today, that's for sure. Your set of information may well require 257 topic headings, but what's the point if people give up after the first 7? How do we make those other 200 digestible and navigable for the people who will actually be trying to read through them?

Like today's UX designers and content strategists, too, some of the 16th century's forerunners were blisteringly dogmatic about these issues:

The number of headings considered optimal ranged widely. Erasmus used 257 in his index by places; others recommended only thirty headings. By contrast, Vincent Placcius in 1689 touted... up to three thousand separate headings. (p.104)

For websites, today, the recommendation usually hovers around seven. Though actually, more and more, that kind of blistering dogma is giving way to prevaricating "it depends"-type answers, rather than settling on a specific number. Here's the bible of web design best practices today, Nielsen Norman Group:

Is it okay to have more than 7-9 top-tier categories in the global navigation? (Spoiler alert: it is okay, you just need to plan appropriately for it.)

And lest you think this is some kind of symptom of today's cancel culture, where anyone can be set upon by a viral mob for offering the "wrong" opinion... Nope. They eventually got to the same place six hundred years ago, too:

Overall, though, choice of headings... [was] left up to each individual. Even Renaissance pedagogues who articulated the "best practices" of the day acknowledged that individuals should modify the general pattern... to suit their purposes. (p.105)

So is there anything about the internet that's different from sixteenth century information design, or have six hundred years of so-called progress led us to exactly the same place we started?

Well, there is the shift towards user-centred design rather than information-centred design, as I mentioned above. That's not nothing. But in terms of actual information technology, there are pretty much only two things the internet does better.

First is supplying the same content in multiple places. Back in the 16th century, if the same page could logically go under two (or three, or four) headings, you either had to spring for extra printing costs, or make a judgement call and pick the one heading you thought was most relevant — and because printing costs weren't trivial, everyone picked the latter. Today, you no longer have to make that choice, because the same page can live under as many headings as you like with virtually no extra cost or effort. As a result, websites are genuinely much more helpful in getting people to the information they're actually looking for.

The other difference, obviously, is that because those giant old books were ends unto themselves and took up enormous amounts of space, you'd really think twice about consulting more than one or two — in fact, the whole point of compendia was precisely that you wouldn't have to consult other works, because they already contained everything worth reading. On the internet, by contrast, you can easily hop between "works" and build up complex webs of links between them, making it much easier for users and researchers to compare different viewpoints and approaches.

So we're not completely devoid of progress in the last six hundred years, but it's worth acknowledging where we've probably hit a natural wall. All the UX designers and content strategists in the world aren't going to be able to permanently solve the problem of overlap between topical indexes. But if we can focus on those things the internet genuinely does better — UX design, surfacing the same information in multiple places, allowing links between different works — we can make those more fundamental problems a little easier to navigate.