Your presentation was one of the most memorable at dux05.

Why, thank you, Grant! I think the only way I could’ve made it more memorable would’ve been to give it standing stark naked.

I don’t think the entire paper is that difficult to read, but I’ll try to answer your question without forcing you to do so.

Students may not come to your website (I doubt that statement, but let’s go with it), however parents might. Or alumni. Or community members. Or prospective life-long-learning attendees (assuming you have some sort of community.

Our research suggests there are 14 topics to look at. (You’ll need to read the paper to get the entire list. It’s on page 8.) For any given area of content on your site, the 14 topics may apply.

For example, if your university has a school of nursing and you have content for prospective students, then you might consider content from the following areas:

• Identifying needs: Is nursing something I should even consider?
• Understanding identified needs: What are all the flavors of nursing? What are all the different approaches for becoming a nurse?
• Choosing solutions: How do I decide which school is right for me?
• Refining solutions: I’ve chosen to go to your school. How do I prepare for my new education?
• Educating others: How do I explain my choice of your school to my friends and family? How do I tell my spouse what to expect about what school will be like for me?
• Purchasing and supporting products: How do I pay for my education? How do I get problems resolved with financial aid? What are my options if I don’t like a teacher/class?
• Inukshuk: What are the experiences of people before me?
• Topical News: What’s changing in the nursing industry in my state? What new certification requirements are there?

These are just some of the 14 questions, but hopefully I’ve explained enough so you can see how you’d use them to help “fill out” the content on the site, even when everyone already knows what the answers to the questions are.

Here’s one that I didn’t get to ask.

You use a lot of examples from University websites to illustrate your point. What if your fundamental assumption–people come to websites for the content–doesn’t apply.

As an IA at a university, I frequently hear “students don’t come to our website to learn about x, y or z. They already know it.” OR “We’re XXXX people already know what they need to.”

Mind-boggling though it may seem, my internal clients frequently feel they “just need a website” not that the need to invest in actual content creation.

Any thoughts or are you going to make me read the whole paper?

A screen reader can build a summary of webpage content based on heading and anchor elements (similar to a table of contents). This enables the user to assess the relevance of the content to their needs without ‘reading’ the entire text. ‘Here’ and ‘click here’ have no value in this context.

When the content of the page is read the link text is declared, e.g. “Link to: link text”. In the copy above, a screen reader would announce “Link to here” (x3).

For sighted users, although the associated text may be read, the format used above requires that it is read to establish context. Think of links as in-text headings. ‘here’, ‘here’ and ‘here’ do not enable users to relocate information by scanning the page.

It may come down to usability ideals/principles, but rather than seeking to do little harm perhaps we should be seeking to enable use?

The guide to writing hypertext includes links to best practice recommendations in the References and further reading.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Of course, our research into information scent has shown that users, while initially scanning for links, do stop and read the associated text for the link, which surrounds it. From this, we’d deduce that there is little harm in links that say “Get the slides from here“.

Do you have user data that suggests otherwise? If so, we’d love to see it.

We’ve compiled a guide on how to write hypertext in an effort to remedy the issue.
(If we’re advocating for usability, we need to start by bringing our own websites up to scratch.)