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Re: labeling audience-based navigation

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 21, 2006 6:50PM

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Peter Weil wrote:

> I am trying to decide the best way to label audience-based navigation links.
> I keep receiving design comps with navigation headers that look like this:
>
> Information for (or "Resources for")
>
> Current Students
> Prospective Students
> Faculty and Staff
> Donors
>
> This doesn't strike me as a particularly good approach.

It's not particularly bad either, but I agree with you. The heading is a
fragment, and the links are fragments too. The naive interpretation, when
seeing a link like "Current Students" is that it is _about_ current
students. And in accessibility, we should worry about people being naive
at times, or regularly.

So I would try to use a heading that acts as a heading, rather than a
starter. I don't know how to express the idea of audience-based navigation
links compactly, but I hope you can figure out something. "Information for
specific audiences" might work if you don't find anything better.

Following these ideas, I would use link texts like
For current students
For prospective students
etc., without capitalization (which can be misleading) except in the first
word. I admit that this may look a bit odd and that it violates the good
design principle that a link should be a noun (substantive) or more
generally a noun clause. Yet, "for ..." is a natural shorthard for
"information for ...".

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/