Smart labels
We??™ve all driven through some unfamiliar part of the world, and we??™ve all gotten lost from
poorly labeled or overly complex road signs. (Those who have driven in and around New
York City may be having flashbacks right now.) Websites are not much different.
The job of the master architect of a user interface is to tell people where they want to go.
The words used in the website navigation??”whether found in the primary menus or in contextual
links??”should be clear, accurate, relevant, and meaningful. People drive through
websites at 60 mph.12 The goal is to provide groups of links that users can browse and
immediately understand; if someone has to slow down and figure out where a link might
go (or worse, waste their time clicking it), then the designer has failed.
Avoiding bad labels means avoiding internal jargon. At a software company whose product
icon resembled a flame, the product manager caught wind of customers using the term
???hitting the fire??? when they activated the product. The product manager wanted to
replace the label Learn About Our Software with Start Hitting the Fire on the company website.
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