Great! Very clean. But when the goal of a website is to deliver insight through data, this linear model starts to fall apart. Once the user reaches the main sections of data visualization and discovery, the goal is no longer funnelling them to another page. The goal is exploration. So while the user can go to different pages, we want the user to stay right here: learning more, interacting more, exploring more. And there’s often no defined task to complete.
“But where does the user go on the page?” You can see how this becomes a difficult question to answer. Most user flows can be visualized using a linear diagram, with nodes being the pages and each line being a different path users can take through the site. This works well when users can choose between a handful of new pages to visit, buttons to click or actions to take.
But with a dashboard-like site, the options for actions to take start to multiply exponentially. Want to know how many possible actions a user can take on this page? Take the number of charts and then multiply it by the number of filters. Take this number, and then multiply it again by the number of sortable fields and/or toggles. It quickly becomes a maze of tangled journeys. A choose-your-own-adventure free-for-all.