Call it what it is
The wife and I went out for dinner last week at a Scottish Pub (MacNiven’s if you must know). We like the food, and the beer selection is outrageous. With our meal they brought an assortment of condiments, both American and from the UK. My favorite UK condiment is called Brown Sauce. It is brown, and it is a sauce. Period. No fancy description or label. It says what it is, and it is what it says (sorry to get Dr. Seuss on you there).
Well what does this have to do with usability or user experience? I thought you would never ask.
The next day I was looking through my Twitter search (follow me @travisbsmith) for “Usability” and the following tweet jumped out at me. It is from @jdgraffam (how exactly do you cite a tweet?).
“In the UK, do you know what they call the brown sauce? Brown sauce. We should do that more often when labeling things online for usability.”
This idea of calling things what they are is huge for usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user experience. Users need to be able to understand what is available to them on a site, as well as where links are going to take them next. Links and titles should be understandable and logical to users. Users who cannot figure out where they want to go next will simply go to another site that speaks to them in language they can understand.
So how do we choose titles and labels that are understood by everyone?
This is one of the great mysteries of the web. There are some titles and labels that are becoming more universal such as, about us, blog, and portfolio. The only way real way to know what your users are looking for is to ask them first. User Research on the front end of a project can give the rest of the project more insight, and a better understanding about what you users want to see on the site. This user testing can be done with an existing product, with prototypes, or even with a simple card sort. The main idea is to find out what users expect to see in terms of labels, or what they think a label means before releasing a product into the wild.
Sure, you will not be able to ensure that 100% of users will understand every label or link, but doing user research and user testing will allow you to be sure that more users will understand your site, and that their overall user experience will be positive.
So until next time, keep it usable, Internets (or World Wide Web if you want to call it what it really is).
Robby Slaughter April 29, 2009
Actually, the label “brown sauce” might be appealing to the minimalist, but this is not a usable title. Jakob Nielsen offers the definition that “Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.” I tell my students at IUPUI that “Usability is the measure of the ease of use of a system when attempting to perform a desired action.” In both cases, the term implies an evaluation of a particular usage. The goal of a label is to communicate valuable details, so to measure usability we must determine the effectiveness of the messaage in achieving this objective. Printing the words “brown sauce” on a condiment does provide a description, but the information about color and purpose is self evident from the bottle itself. By convention, all bottles on tables contain sauces. All bottles are clear (or colored to match their contents.) “Brown sauce” is not usable, but merely redundant. It’s like plastering the phrase “sports car” across a Corvette. To further explain, consider a condiment that is labeled “red sauce.” This could be ketchup, BBQ sauce, mariana, salsa, strawberry jelly, cocktail sauce or tabasco. Marking any of these items as simply “red sauce” would create confusion. In fact, “brown sauce” itself does not explain the intended purpose of the stuff. Perhaps that’s why we American’s call it “steak sauce.” That’s what it’s for. @jdgraffram’s tweet (see http://twitter.com/jdgraffam/statuses/1542299472) seems to confuse accuracy and utility. It’s like the old joke about the lost tourist who asks the programmer where they are. “You’re inside a car, stopped at a street corner in New York City.” This is information which is precisely correct but totally useless. Usability should strive to help people, not tell them what they already know.JD Graffam May 1, 2009
You’re both right. The purpose of my initial tweet was to say that interface designers should strive to use simple language to describe what things are or what they do, and I think you got that, Travis. Robby’s simply adding that every label should be the product of context, where the user’s mind is at when confronted with using the object of the label.Amelia May 1, 2009
Thanks for posting this. I linked your entry just now. In my experience in the library world (I’ve worked in public libraries & as a library consultant) one of my biggest pet peeves is that a reference desk isn’t referred to as a help desk. Calling things what they are seems like it would be an obvious thing, wouldn’t it?Travis Smith May 4, 2009
Thanks for all the feedback. I think that the we should strive to keep our labels simple, and allow the context of the website or software enrich and give more meaning to the labels we use. Amelia, I completely agree with you, but I fear that the Reference Desk is a hold over from a previous time. My mother is a librarian from the days when people needed more help navigating the library, and not just wanting someone to help them do their homework.Amelia May 8, 2009
Travis, I totally agree that the term “Reference Desk” is getting anachronistic, but in my opinion it’s never really been an ideal term. Having worked at a reference desk, I will tell you that the bulk of user interactions are more of a general customer service nature than a response to a research need. I got asked about things like payphones and restrooms and wifi a lot more frequently than you’d think. I can’t imagine this is new. I think people definitely still need help navigating the library–the problem now is that people is they don’t realize they need it. And even the ones that do need help are reluctant to ask, or don’t know how to ask for what they need. Information literacy! Grr, argh!Lisa Bailey May 20, 2009
We’ve been finding lately that some CMSs have crazy confusing menu titles - usually because it’s a case of 1 size fits a million different uses. So we’ve actually started citing that as a benefit of content built system - sounds silly telling a client ‘we give things obvious menu titles’ but it is so important! Lx