Maps are more real than experience

There are two ways of conceptualizing a path to take: a map or a series of directions. People usually feel that the map makes more sense than their memory of the way they went or the sequential directions something like Google map gives you.

In the real world, people often want to look at a map after they’ve spent the day walking around a new city, to see where they’ve been.

In the digital world, they read and trust maps that are given to them. These maps often look like persistent navigation, or category pages that lay out the organization of a site. We saw this first hand when we added an active state to the navigation when you were looking at hub pages. PMs were positive the URLs had changed as well, though they had not.

See: Maps need to be visually coded as such