If you’ve ever been to a really good museum or botanical garden or an IKEA, they typically have a maze-like layout.

Rather than a central hub with clear in-and-out spokes, they encourage you to wander and meander. They have small little side paths, sometimes unlabelled on the map, where you can often find surprises or hidden gems (metaphorical, not literal).

Websites of days past were like this, too!

Before blogs and UX-as-a-discipline and every-ecommerce-site-looks-like-a-Shopify-template, websites encouraged you to explore. They’d have subpages you could only find by navigating deeper into a primary one.

They were filled with easter eggs and whimsy and hidden paths to explore.

This is one of the biggest appeals of digital gardening to me. It encourages you to explore a bit and find hidden paths.

I’m not trying to say that UX is bad.

Established UX patterns make sites easier to navigate and use. That’s a good thing!

But somewhere along the way, everything on the web became so bland, so much the same. The web lost its personality and soul.

Finding balance

My favorite sites are a bit like a maze.

They’ve got some obvious entry paths, and some clear through paths if you just want to get somewhere. But they’ve got some interesting side-paths and dead ends, too.

Today, someone shared this gem of a website with me that reminds me so much of the web of yore. I love it!