EXP-009generativeLive
The swarm.
One visitor getting lost is an anecdote; a hundred is evidence. This releases a hundred simulated visitors into an invented city-government sitemap, an org chart published as a website, and lets their trails burn a heatmap of exactly where the structure fails.
100 visitors · One task
Trails accumulate until you reset
You got a parking ticket last night. Find where to pay it before the fine doubles.
Bench notes
- The model
- Each visitor follows information scent: every label has a pull, every visitor has their own noise, patience, and willingness to backtrack. Individually they're erratic. In aggregate they settle into the same shape real tree-test data has: crowds piling into the plausible-but-wrong branch.
- What it is not
- Research. These are simulated visitors, a caricature tuned to look like real findability data. The swarm shows why a structure fails at scale; only real users can tell you that it does.
- What to notice
- Run the parking ticket. The crowd splits between Parking & Streets and How Do I → Pay, two perfectly named dead ends, while the ticket waits under Municipal Court. From above, that's the whole disease of government sites: filed by the department that owns it, not the errand you came to do.