'It's the Journey & the Destination': shape and the emergent property of genre in evaluating digital documents

Navigation is a limited metaphor for hypermedia and website use that potentially constrains our understanding of human-computer interaction. In the present paper we trace the emergence of the navigation metaphor and the empirical analysis of navigation measures in usability evaluation before suggesting an alternative concept to consider: shape. The shape concept affords, we argue, a richer analytic tool for considering humans' use of digital documents and invokes social level analyses of meaning that are shared among discourse communities who both produce and consume the information resources.