teeny tiny links can hurt usability

Consider the following Web site navigation:

Home | Priorities | Giving | Council | Alumni Efforts | Foundation Challenge

You might be able to guess that this is the main navigation for an alumni site of some school. But aside from Home, can you formulate a clear idea of where any of these links will lead?

always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web

Supposing your goal is to join this institution's alumni association. Which of these links would you follow first? Would you follow any at all? And what exactly is a Foundation Challenge, anyway?

You see this all over the Web: critical navigation distilled down to as few words as possible--preferably a single word. Design teams hold meetings in which everyone struggles to come up with the right word to describe a category of activities, a diverse collection of information, a whole branch of services. It's mind-numbing work, and for a good reason: few single- or two-word descriptions are up to the job. The result is navigation written in a sort of cryptograph that's maybe understandable to people within the organization but that users must decode by pogosticking all around the site.

This overcondensation of information started with the earliest table-based Web designs, the going mindset at the time being

1. the zeal to keep page dimensions small enough to be seen in their entirety on very small computer screens


2. the assumption that users are never willing scroll under any conditions

The accepted practice was to design Web sites roughly as squares about 600 pixels to a side. Navigation was encased in minute rectangles, stacked in attenuated columns, or paired with distracting and largely useless graphical buttons. Sites of any volume frequently had architectures many layers deep to accommodate the brief amount of signage available in each section.

Eventually, better equipped and more informed Web design delivered us from these claustrophobic dimensions. But the wording of links seems to be slow in recovering. Navigation still frequently gets squinched into little bitty wafers. One of the worst offenders of this is the nearly universal horizontal top navigation sandwiched just below page banners or conflated with the banner design itself. Aside from often falling prey to banner blindness, this type of navigation frequently allows for nothing but the briefest of signage.

Contrast this with the findings of Jared Spool et. al., which show that links of around 7-12 words are far more successful at creating a strong scent of information. This wording can, and often does, include associated text, such as "To see previous issues of Dairy Digest, visit our archive."

Of course, length alone doesn't determine whether links will actually help users make correct navigational choices. It's the wording that must make it abundantly clear what information lies ahead. Wording that instills confidence in the navigating user: Yes! I am heading in the right direction!

I discovered a fine example of this in the late '90s when I worked on the marketing team in Penn State's Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Our team spent several months gathering marketing data on student's applying to Penn State (and their families) to learn what information worked best for them -- and how best to deliver that information on the Web and in print. At the time, we had a pretty good idea that the phrase "Prospective Students" meant little to them, and our research confirmed this. But what we learned in addition was that widely used "Future Students" also missed the mark. In the end, we found that "Students interested in applying to Penn State" or "Students interested in attending Penn State" spoke to our audience much more clearly, and that's what we used in our materials.

The next time you find yourself or your design team wording navigation by casting about for le mot juste, entertain these questions:

• Is the site design imposing too much of a space limit on navigation?
• Who are we helping by condensing the text of our links down to one or two words?
• Do we actually know what trigger words work for this audience?

Granted, sometimes strong scent of information can happen in one or two words within a tiny wafer somewhere near the top of the page. More often, it cannot.