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Guitar | May 17 2004

I once had a guitar that kept going out of tune. Two minutes after I tuned it, it would need to be tuned again. Finally I took it to an expert, a guy who built his own guitars, and he said the guitar was warped in such a way that it couldn’t be tuned at both ends. If you tuned it at the top, it would be out of tune at the bottom, and vice versa.

Most things, I’ve noticed recently, are shaped like that guitar.

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The last few weeks I’ve been working with a client on navigation for a large, complicated website. After much discussion and debate, we’ve arrived at what appears to be the correct set of top-level sections. The only problem is that some of the content doesn’t totally fit into any of these sections. Whenever we change the sections to accommodate this content—say, by adding new sections or by changing the names of existing sections—the set of top-level sections seems wrong.

Although this may sound like the guitar example above, my sense is that it’s a case of a missing breakthrough. There’s a solution out there that will address both ends of the problem, only we haven’t found it yet.

I’m not sure how I know this.