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Re: Identifying link targets

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Sep 22, 2004 9:06AM

> Maybe, though it would be more logical to put "PDF" and "DOC" _after_
> the title proper. After all, it's a matter of data format, not
> content.

Some of these forms have extremely long titles. I thought it'd be odd to
have to sit through the title repeatedly just to find how which file format
it is.

> And when you offer something in DOC and PDF format only, you are
> already in the inaccessible side.

This is out of my hands. I agree with you, but this isn't a part of this
discussion for now, unfortunately.

> Anyway, you are already in a less than optimal situation. Nobody can
> reasonably expect the result to be perfect in all ways. But making the
> linked resources name (title) the link text you gain quite a lot,
> even in usability. Consider the "normal" user who moves the mouse
> over a link and sees the link text change (color change, removal of
> underline, or whatever). This is very useful feedback for checking,
> without much noticing, that you hit the right link. Compare this with
> using "PDF" or "DOC" as link text, for lots of links.

Well, I disagree on this one. For a sighted person, a table would make a lot
of sense:

form title DOC PDF

With some visual cues (row shading, etc.) It'd be very easy to scan down the
list of titles, then over to the appropriate file format.

Combining the file format WITH the title causes two usability problems: it
duplicates each entry, and removes the file format from an easily-scannable
columnar layout.

> But there's yet another approach:
> - put links to the PDF versions on one page and links to the DOC
> versions on another; naturally you then use just the names as links,
> and you have some general note on the format at the start

I was actually thinking about this too, and I do think this is another good
option. Pros: one title per item, you know what the file format it. Cons: if
you need both (some do) it's a bit more clicking. If you scan down a long
list only to realize it's the wrong format, switching the other page and
scrolling down again can get a tad tedious.

> Quite probably, each user, in each browsing situation, wants
> to select the data format first, instead of downloading one document
> as PDF, another as DOC (which is possible in my scenario, too, just a
> bit clumsy).

Well...we'd actually have folks that need both, but that wouldn't be the
majority.

Thanks for the suggestion. Another option to consider!

-Darrel