Secret Lives of Links – SxSW 2012
William
In Philosophy, SxSW, Usability Posted March 15, 2012
The scent of good information is strong – Humans are infovores for content.
Content trigger words prompt users for action. Having a link is useless without descriptive content. Links secretly want to deliver you to the content.
Good design is greater than the experience. The back button, however is the Button of DOOM. The back button always predicts failure of the system. 95% of users fail after 2 uses of the back button to try and figure out content.
Bring your own link to the search button. Well managed search logs will key the owner into the user’s trigger words. Because 7% of users search on the home page, it’s important to track the page the search bar was used from (that is, the page the user lost ‘scent’ on). 53% of users have more success without the use of search.
Users won’t pogo back and forth between content – links which are rich and differentiating will promote success. Pogo design means that users will get lost of fed up.
The number of pages to purchase, conversion, etc. is a good indication of the quality of the link – less is always more. Even a more cluttered page can bring more value if there is differentiation and quality behind the substance of the links.
Secondary navigation fails users every time – users have already decided the action they want to take before they get to the link, the hover confuses users.
Good design is invisible and as such, your design must help emit the right scents. You can remain cool while still delivering consistent visual language around what you want users to act upon.
See also
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