Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card's information foraging theory compares information-seeking to animals foraging for food. People follow information scent, cues like link text, headings, and titles, to judge whether a path is likely to lead somewhere valuable, the way a forager senses they're getting "hotter" or "colder." An information patch is a cluster of valuable information, a section of a site, a document, a topic cluster. Foragers stay within a patch as long as it remains productive, then move to another once it's exhausted. Their information diet is the pattern of what they choose to pursue versus what they ignore, weighing expected value against the cost of pursuing it.
When scent is strong, people navigate confidently and find what they need. When scent is weak or absent, people either guess, effectively performing a random walk, or give up entirely. Strengthening scent means making the value of a path visible before the user has to commit to following it.
Weak information scent doesn't just slow people down, it makes them stop trusting their own judgment about where to click next.
1: At the course list. A course code like MATH 2210 carries no information value to someone who doesn't already know the department's numbering conventions. The homepage got her to the right department, so the patch itself is likely fine, the breakdown happens specifically where she has to choose which course to open.
2: A scent problem. This is not a patch issue, Mathematics is plausibly the correct patch for an introductory statistics course. It's not a diet issue either, she isn't choosing to pursue the wrong category, she simply has no cues available to judge value before clicking. The available cues (bare course codes) don't tell her anything about whether a given course is worth opening.
This is a useful distinction to hold onto: scent problems and patch problems look similar from the outside, both result in the user leaving empty-handed, but they call for different fixes. A patch problem means the content is organized under the wrong category. A scent problem means the content might be organized correctly, but the cues at the decision point don't communicate value.The direct fix here is to show course titles, level indicators, and a short one-line description directly in the list, so she can judge relevance without opening anything. This restores scent at exactly the point where it broke down, without requiring any change to how courses are categorized.