The Big O: IA Lessons from Orienteering
...from Boxes and Arrows (by Gene Smith)

Lost is lost. When you can't find your place on a web page, it's every bit as frustrating as when you can't figure out where you are in the woods. Orienteering, a sport where competitors use a pre-marked map to navigate through a terrain, uses map reading skills, catching features, and attack points to help practitioners reach their goals.

How can this apply to designing web pages? Orienteers ignore details on a map that aren't important to the goal and focuses only on important features. In a similar way, someone reading a web page scans for important information and ignores everything else.

Catching features and attack points rough and precise map reading, help orienteers and your web page visitors figure out where they are, whether they're getting close to their goal, and what to do when they get where they want to go.