Webmaster Jam Presentation Online
September 26th, 2006
Last week, I spoke at the CoffeeCup Webmaster Jam Session. Giovanni Gallucci was kind enough to take lots of cool pictures and record my presentation, Why Good Content Must Suck (Part 1 and Part 2 [Thanks Joseph!]).
You can download the slides for the presentation from here.
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:16 am
[...] Another highlight for me was seeing Jared Spool discuss why good content must suck. Jared is one of the webs pre-eminent usability speakers and now I can see why. His presentation was engaging, insightful and very entertaining. Who knew usability could be so much fun? I had a bit of a chat with Jared after the event and hopefully we’ll be able to get him over to the UK for next years d.Construct. [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Great presentation. I particularly enjoyed slides 21 & 22 about link text (particularly relating to length and trigger words). I was astounded, of course, to see the following appear on this very page (http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/09/26/webmaster-jam-presentation-online/):
You can download the slides for the presentation from here.
The link text is “here”. That’s actually a bit worse than the horrible “click here” that we still see on sites.
October 2nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Deb,
When we talk about link length, we talk about both the underlined portion of the link and what we call the associated text, the text that contributes to the meaning of the link.
If the link was just:
here
it would qualify as being too short.
But the link you showed actually has 10 words, falling nicely into the 7-12 range. Our studies have shown the length of the underlined portion, by itself, doesn’t predict success or failure. But the combination of the underlined portion and the associated text does.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:08 am
Jared,
Thanks for the reply. You have an interesting position on what constitutes link text. In our work, we’ve considered link text to be the text that is hyperlinked (whether underlined or made obvious as a link in some other way such as bolding).
I wonder what your thoughts are on this topic as it relates to users who interact with Web sites using assistive technology such as a screen reader? The jump to links feature enables them to jump to the linked text to determine whether the link provides an appropriate path to their desired destination … the word “here” (or “click here” or “more details” or “read more”, etc.) hardly provide the context that is needed to make such a decision.
There are many instances in which making a Web site accessible to users with disabilities will have a side benefit of making it even more usable for users who do not rely on assistive technology to use sites. I think this is one of those cases … we’ve seen users scan with their eyes to links to determine if they should follow a particular path – of course sighted users can back up and read the preceding text as context if it is missing from the linked text … but why would we want to make them do that?
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Deb, I’m the first to admit that our knowledge of making sites accessible is fairly limited. This is not an area we’ve focused on. (We’re still working on understanding how to make sites usable for those of us who are ‘abled’.)
Given that, I wonder how many people using screen readers attempt to jump around blog posts without reading the accompanying text. While I could see many times that would happen on, say, an e-commerce or informational index site, I wonder if you can get the value of a blog post by just jumping from link to link in the screen reader.
Sighted people have regularly questioned our use of “here” links on this blog, citing the screen reader issue. However, we haven’t heard from anyone who actually uses a screen reader that this practice is an issue, in the context we’re using it.
October 4th, 2006 at 6:58 am
I found the presentation very informative, and useful for evaluating some things on sites I currently maintain.
The audio file you link to however only seems to go about halfway through the presentation. I found a complete audio copy of the presentation from the webmaster jam site, http://www.webjamsession.com/
October 4th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Hi Jared, you make a great point here … and that is: all of this stuff has an “it depends” element to it, doesn’t it? While we can create standards and guidelines and point to best practices, we really need to take into account the entire situation at hand before deciding on the best UI design.
In reference to this particular topic, our research has shown that the jump to links feature is widely used, however I’ve not seen anything on whether it is more or less used on a blog versus a traditional informational site, ecommerce site, etc.
Perhaps someone reading this will have more information they can share with us.
And thank you for taking the time to reply to my previous posts. I enjoyed our conversation!
October 30th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
[...] Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering spoke a month ago at the CoffeeCup Webmaster Jam in Dallas, TX, and introduced the concept of trigger words. Jared has long been talking about a user’s Scent of Information when navigating a Web site, and trigger words are an extension of that: a user will continue to navigate through a site (move from page to page to page) if they see the words that trigger them to click. A key to that idea is that each word (sometimes supplemented by images and additional text around that word) must be more and more specific until it eventually leads to the content that user wants. [...]
March 5th, 2007 at 4:19 am
Oops, the presentation isn’t available. :-/
March 5th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Fixed…