The Motive Internet Glossary
mine-sweeping, minesweeping
Minesweeping is a euphemism for a user’s response to an interface where there is insufficient differentiation between active, ‘clickable’ elements (such as navigation), and content. Without appropriate visual cues, the user must ‘scrub’ the screen to ‘unearth’ active elements.
Visual cues that differentiate active elements include;
- context/location (e.g. in Western tradition, navigation is commonly located to the top- left of the screen),
- three-dimensionality such as the use of shadows and bevels,
- underlines, to indicate hyperlinks,
- labels that match the user’s expectation of navigation and command words, for example the labels ‘Home’ and ‘Search’ have specific meaning in the context of website design.
GUI, interface, perceived affordance
Glossary A-Z