Web users are task oriented and want to satisfy their needs quickly. Deciding which category or link to click requires cognitive effort. For every page, people must review and compare the choices and then decide which one will most likely produce the desired effect. This process can be exhausting, especially if each decision causes doubt. The anguish of being wrong often leads to fatigue and frustration, which in turn causes people to abandon websites. Clever category names cause doubt and hinder site exploration. The more confident people feel about their decisions, the more likely they are to engage with your website.
Good link names help people quickly and accurately predict what they’ll get before they click a link. Descriptive category names that people understand have a better chance of being discovered and clicked than do clever made-up words or internal jargon. Because website designers are usually domain experts, they’re familiar with internal jargon and sometimes forget that their audiences are not. It’s easy to assume accidentally that internal vernacular also speaks to the outside world. Cleaning up unhelpful labels helps create a better user experience and can positively impact people’s perception of your organization.
Five tips for making category names discoverable
1. Choose descriptive words and phrases that your users relate to, even if the words sound boring. It’s essential that your navigational labels be easily understood. Choose function over form. When labels are nondescript, people are more likely to click the wrong link and miss information that they need. In usability studies, we often watch someone skip a category name that has weak information scent, even though that link leads to the item they are looking for.
Category names such as Support and Solutions often cause trouble, because people can’t accurately predict which information they contain. Both options can be interpreted to have similar meaning.
2. Avoid made-up terms. Don’t be tempted by the allure of clever names. Stick to commonly used words. For example, "About Us" is better than "Company Experience" because it is a more-common phrase. Featuring user-centric language improves reaction time, which is important to website visitors who navigate quickly. If you must use fancy names, always explain their meaning, because people tend to skip over meaningless words.
(Our course on Writing for the Web goes into more detail on how to convert feature-driven language into user-driven language, so that people can relate to your message.)
3. Check for overlapping categories. Category names must be just right to attract the proper attention. They can’t be to too broad, too narrow, vague, ambiguous, or share meaning with each other. Getting names right requires careful attention and lots of testing, for example with card sorting. The most useful categorization schemes have distinct and descriptive categories.
4. Use classification schemes that communicate attributes your users can decipher. One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make when categorizing components is to use schemes that are familiar to them, such as mirroring their organizational charts or arranging products by model number. As a result, it’s common for websites to make perfect sense to their creators but not to their intended audiences.
In usability studies, people usually look for products and services that satisfy conditions, such as output levels and footprint dimensions. Most users don’t click on model names or numbers to determine product parameters, especially when the category names lack sufficient meaning.
Internal schemes are often counterintuitive to users’ way of thinking. In a study with students researching university websites, we discovered that 48% of prospective students did not realize the university offered their major or program of choice. The main reason for these failures is that many of the websites organized academic programs by department names that were unfamiliar to new students.
5. Don’t rely on your instincts when deciding label names. That can get you in trouble. Test names with your users to make sure they can accurately predict which information is contained in each category. Research methods, such as card sorting, can help you get feedback on your labels and can show you how to structure your website, so that people can navigate it effectively.
Conclusion
Obscure category names often increase the interaction cost because they force people to guess (often wrongly) what the labels refer to. Also, websites with poor labels cause users to make choices that don’t match their goals, which often leads to errors. No matter how tempting cool names may seem, stay away from them: they suck.
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