Navigate, don't search

But very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here. We can do it at small scales. Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

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Take the humble “document” as an example. For decades, document editing programs like word processors effectively emulated a printed sheet of paper, onto which the user typed with an emulated typewriter. Other software tools like spreadsheets did better, managing to escape complete skeuomorphism in favor of an infinite canvas. Notion is another goo... See more