Labels describe the hypertext links within the body of a document or chunk of information, and naturally occur within the descriptive context of their surrounding text. Contextual links are easy to create and are the basis for the exciting interconnectedness that drives much of the Web’s success.

However, just because contextual links are relatively easy to create doesn’t mean they necessarily work well. In fact, ease of creation introduces problems. Contextual links are generally not developed systematically; instead, they are developed in an ad hoc manner when the author makes a connection between his text and something else, and encodes that association in his document. These hypertext connections are therefore more heterogeneous and personal than, say, the connections between items in a hierarchy, where links are understood to be connecting parent items and child items. The result is that contextual link labels mean different things to different people. You see the link “Shakespeare” and, upon clicking it, expect to be taken to the Bard’s biography. I, on the other hand, expect to be taken to his Wikipedia entry. In fact, the link actually takes us to a page for the village of Shakespeare, New Mexico, USA. Go figure....

To be more representational of the content they connect to, contextual links rely instead upon, naturally, context. If the content’s author succeeds at establishing that context in his writing, then the label draws meaning from its surrounding text. If he doesn’t, the label loses its representational value, and users are more likely to experience occasionally rude surprises.

Because Fidelity (Figure 6-2) is a site dedicated to providing information to investors, contextual links need to be straightforward and meaningful. Fidelity’s contextual link labels, such as “stocks,” “mutual funds,” and “Learn how to invest,” are representational, and draw on surrounding text and headings to make it clear what type of help you’ll receive if you click through. These highly representational labels are made even clearer by their context: explanatory text, clear headings, and a site that itself has a few straightforward uses.

Figure 6-2. The contextual links on this page from Fidelity are straightforward and meaningful

On the other hand, contextual links on a personal web log (“blog”) aren’t necessarily so clear. The author is among friends and can assume that his regular readers possess a certain level of background, or really, contextual knowledge. Or he knows that keeping his link labels less representational creates some mystery around what they’ll lead to. So the author may choose to design contextual link labels that aren’t so representational.

In Figure 6-3, the author expects us to know who “Eric Sinclair” is—perhaps he’s been mentioned in this blog before. Or the author knows that we’ll recognize the label “Eric Sinclair” as a person, and provides some minimal context—the fact that Eric wrote some comments—to entice the user to click through. “They Rule” is equally mysterious; we have no idea what this label represents, but the blog author contextualizes it as “fascinating” and “scary.” Nonrepresentational labels have their place; as it’s likely that we already trust the author’s opinion, we’ll probably want to click through and learn more. But without that degree of trust already in place, nonrepresentational links can be damaging.

Figure 6-3. These contextual links aren’t very representational, but that’s acceptable when there is a high degree of trust for the author

As we’ll see, other varieties of labels derive context, and therefore meaning, from being part of larger sets of labels or labeling systems. But systematic consistency isn’t quite so possible with link labels. These labels are instead glued together by the copy and context rather than membership in a peer group. However, consistency among these labels and the chunks of information to which they link remains an issue to keep in mind.

An information architect can ensure that contextual link labels are representational by asking herself, “What kind of information will the user expect to be taken to?” before creating and labeling a contextual link. Contextual links are created in such an ad hoc manner that simply asking this question will improve the quality of representation. (An easy way to study users’ interpretations of labels is to provide a printout of a page with the labels clearly identified, and have subjects jot down what they’d expect each to link to.)

On the other hand, it’s important to acknowledge that contextual links are often not within the information architect’s control. Usually, content authors are responsible for contextual links. They are the ones who know the meaning of their content and how to best link it to other content. So while you may want to enforce rules for contextual link labels (such as what an employee’s name should always link to), you may be better off suggesting guidelines to content authors (such as suggesting that employees’ names link to a corresponding directory listing when possible).

Labels are often used as headings that describe the chunk of information that follows. Headings, as shown in Figure 6-4, are often used to establish a hierarchy within a text. Just as in a book, where headings help us distinguish chapters from sections, they also help us determine a site’s subsites, or differentiate categories from subcategories.

Figure 6-4. Numbering, bullets, bolding, and vertical whitespace help the reader distinguish heading labels

The hierarchical relationships between headings—whether parent, child, or sibling—are usually established visually through consistent use of numbering, font sizes, colors and styles, whitespace and indentation, or combinations thereof. A visually clear hierarchy, often the work of information or graphic designers, can take some pressure off information architects by reducing the need to create labels that convey that hierarchy. So a set of labels that don’t mean much can suddenly take on meaning when presented in a hierarchy. For example, this set of inconsistent headings may be quite confusing:

However, they are much more meaningful when presented in a hierarchy:

Our Furniture Selection
Office Chairs
        Our buyer's picks
                Chairs from Steelcase
                Hon products
                Herman Miller
                        Aerons
Lateral Files

It’s also important not to be too rigidly bound to showcasing hierarchical relationships. In Figure 6-5, heading labels such as “Background” and “Scouting report” represent the text that follows them. Yet the statistics closer to the top of the page don’t merit the same treatment because most readers could visually distinguish these without actually reading them. In other words, inserting the heading “Statistics” before the numbers and applying to it the same typographic style as “Background” and “Scouting report” wouldn’t greatly benefit users, who, as baseball fans, would likely recognize them already.

Figure 6-5. This hierarchy of heading labels is inconsistent, but that’s OK

It is interesting to note, however, that it’s difficult to distinguish one column of statistics from another, so each utilizes its own heading label.

We can be a bit more flexible when designing hierarchical headings, but it’s especially important to maintain consistency when labeling steps in a process. To successfully navigate a process, it’s typically necessary for users to complete each step along the way, so heading labels have to be obvious and must also convey sequence. Using numbers is an obvious way to communicate progression, and consistently framing the labels as actions—utilizing verbs—also helps tie together the sequence of steps. In effect, the labels should tell users where to start, where to go next, and what action will be involved in each step along the way. Figure 6-6 shows a page from Northwest Airlines in which the heading labels are clearly numbered, are consistently laid out, and utilize a consistent syntax that describes the question addressed in each step of the process.

Figure 6-6. Sequential numbering and consistent syntax keep these labels clear

Heading labels, whether hierarchical or sequenced, come in multiples, and should be more systematically designed than contextual link labels.

Because navigation systems typically have a small number of options, their labels demand consistent application more than any other type of label. A single inconsistent option can introduce an “apples and oranges” effect more quickly to a navigation system, which usually has fewer than ten choices, than to a set of index terms, which might have thousands. Additionally, a navigation system typically occurs again and again throughout a site, so navigation labeling problems are magnified through repeated exposure.

Users rely on a navigation system to behave “rationally” through consistent page location and look; labels should be no different. Effectively applied labels are integral to building a sense of familiarity, so they’d better not change from page to page. That’s why using the label “Main” on one page, “Main Page” on another, and “Home” elsewhere could destroy the familiarity that the user needs when navigating a site. In Figure 6-7, the horizontal navigation system’s four labels—“Getting Started,” “Our Funds,” “Planning,” and “My Account”—are applied consistently throughout the site, and would be even more effective if colors and locations were also consistent.

Figure 6-7. Janus’ navigation system labels remain consistent throughout the site

There are no standards, but some common variants exist for many navigation system labels. You should consider selecting one from each of these categories and applying it consistently, as these labels are already familiar to most web users. Here is a nonexhaustive list:

Of course, the same label can often represent different kinds of information. For example, in one site, “News” may link to an area that includes announcements of new additions to the site. In another site, “News” may link to an area of news stories describing national and world events. Obviously, if you use the same labels in different ways within your own site, your users will be very confused.

To address both problems, navigational labels can be augmented by brief descriptions (also known as scope notes) when initially introduced on the main page. In Figure 6-8, the navigation system labels appear in brief on the lefthand side, and are described with scope notes in the body of the main page.

Figure 6-8. Scope notes are provided for each of the navigation system labels

In this case, if more representational navigation system labels had been used in the first place, they may have diminished the need to devote so much valuable main page real estate to scope notes. There are alternatives to scope notes that don’t monopolize real estate, such as using JavaScript rollovers and other scripted mouseover effects to display the scope note, but these aren’t an established convention. If you feel that your site will be regularly used by a loyal set of users who are willing to learn your site’s conventions, then it’s worth considering these alternatives; otherwise, we suggest keeping things simple by making your navigation labels representational.

Often referred to as keywords, tags, descriptive metadata, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri, sets of index term labels can be used to describe any type of content: sites, subsites, pages, content chunks, and so on. By representing the meaning of a piece of content, index terms support more precise searching than simply searching the full text of content—someone has assessed the content’s meaning and described it using index terms, and searching those terms ought to be more effective than having a search engine match a query against the content’s full text.

Index terms are also used to make browsing easier: the metadata from a collection of documents can serve as the source of browsable lists or menus. This can be highly beneficial to users, as index terms provide an alternative to a site’s primary organization system, such as an information architecture organized by business unit. Index terms in the form of site indexes and other lists provide a valuable alternative view by “cutting across the grain” of organizational silos.

In Figure 6-9, this index of the BBC’s site is generated from index term labels, which, in turn, are used to identify content from many different Sun business units. Much of the content already accessible through the BBC site’s primary organization system is also accessible by browsing these index terms (e.g., keywords).

Figure 6-9. The BBC’s site index

Frequently, index terms are completely invisible to users. The records we use to represent documents in content management systems and other databases typically include fields for index terms, which are often heard but not seen: they come into play only when you search. Similarly, index terms may be hidden as embedded metadata in an HTML document’s <META...> or <TITLE> tags. For example, a furniture manufacturer’s site might list the following index terms in the <META...> tags of records for its upholstered items:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="upholstery, upholstered, sofa, couch, 
loveseat, love seat, sectional, armchair, arm chair, easy chair, 
chaise lounge">

So a search on “sofa” would retrieve the page with these index terms even if the term “sofa” doesn’t appear anywhere in the page’s text. Figure 6-10 shows a similar, more delectable example from Epicurious.com. A search for “snack” retrieves this recipe, though there is no mention of the term in the recipe itself. “Snack” is likely stored separately as an index term in a database record for this recipe.

Figure 6-10. A search for “snack” retrieves this recipe, even though the term doesn’t appear within the text

It’s interesting how many sites’ main pages don’t feature index terms. Organizations do crazy, expensive things to get their sites noticed, including advertising their URL on banners flown over football stadiums. But using index terms to describe a main page is a much cheaper way for getting that page, and the site as a whole, indexed and “known” so that users who search the Web are more likely to find it.^[2]

Getting your pages to stand out from one another is a different and much more daunting challenge. That’s where a more systematic approach to labeling—using index terms from controlled vocabularies or thesauri—has more value. These sets of labels are designed to describe a delineated domain—such as products and services, or oncology—and to do so in a consistent, predictable manner. We’ll describe these vocabularies in great detail in Chapter 9.

It’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words. But which thousand?

Icons can represent information in much the same way as text can. We see them most frequently used as navigation system labels. Additionally, icons occasionally serve as heading labels and have even been known to show up as link labels, although this is rare.

The problem with iconic labels is that they constitute a much more limited language than text. That’s why they’re more typically used for navigation system or small organization system labels, where the list of options is small, than for larger sets of labels such as index terms, where iconic “vocabularies” are quickly outstripped. (They also can work well for less text-oriented audiences, like children.)

Even so, iconic labels are still a risky proposition in terms of whether or not they can represent meaning. Figure 6-11 is a navigation aid from jetBlue’s web site. But what do the icons mean to you?

Figure 6-11. Icons from jetBlue’s navigation system

Even given the fairly specific context of an airline’s site, most users probably won’t understand this language immediately, although they might correctly guess the meaning of one or two of these labels.

Since the iconic labels are presented with textual labels, our test wasn’t really fair. But it is interesting to note that even the site’s designers acknowledge that the iconic labels don’t stand well on their own and hence need textual explanations.

Iconic labels like these add aesthetic quality to a site, and as long as they don’t compromise the site’s usability, there’s no reason not to use them. In fact, if your site’s users visit regularly, the iconic “language” might get established in their minds through repeated exposure. In such situations, icons are an especially useful shorthand, both representational and easy to visually recognize—a double bonus. But it’s interesting to note that jetBlue’s subsidiary pages don’t use iconic labels alone; they’ve chosen to maintain the icon/text pairing throughout their site. Unless your site has a patient, loyal audience of users who are willing to learn your visual language, we suggest using iconic labels only for systems with a limited set of options, being careful not to place form ahead of function.

Remember that content, users, and context affect all aspects of an information architecture, and this is particularly true with labels. Any of the variables attached to users, content, and context can drag a label into the land of ambiguity.

Let’s go back to the term “pitch.” From baseball (what’s thrown) to football (the field where it’s played in the United Kingdom), from sales (what’s sometimes made on the golf course) to sailing (the angle of the boat in the water), there are at least 15 different definitions, and it’s hard to make sure that your site’s users, content, and context will converge upon the same definition. This ambiguity makes it difficult to assign labels to describe content, and difficult for users to rely on their assumptions about what specific labels actually mean.

So what can we do to make sure our labels are less ambiguous and more representational? The following two guidelines may help.

Now that you’re ready to design labeling systems, where do you start? Believe it or not, this is the easy part. Unless you’re dealing with ideas, concepts, and topics that until now were unknown to humanity, you’ll probably have something to start with. And already having a few labels generally beats starting from scratch, which can be prohibitively expensive, especially with large vocabularies.

Existing labeling systems might include the labels currently on your site, or comparable or competitors’ sites. Ask yourself who might have taken this on before. Study, learn, and “borrow” from what you find on other sites. And keep in mind that a major benefit of examining existing labeling systems is that they’re systems—they’re more than odd, miscellaneous labels that don’t necessarily fit together.

As you look for existing labeling systems, consider what works and what doesn’t. Which systems can you learn from, and, perhaps more importantly, which of those labels can you keep? There are a variety of sources for labels that you should examine.

Comparable and competitive sites

If you don’t have a site in place or are looking for new ideas, look elsewhere for labeling systems. The open nature of the Web allows us to learn from one another and encourages an atmosphere of benevolent plagiarism. So, just as you might view the source of a wonderfully designed page, you can “borrow” from another site’s great labeling system.

Determine beforehand what your audiences’ needs are most likely to be, and then surf your competitors’ sites, borrowing what works and noting what doesn’t (you might consider creating a label table for this specific purpose). If you don’t have competitors, visit comparable sites or sites that seem to be best in class.

If you surf multiple competitive or comparative sites, you may find that labeling patterns emerge. These patterns may not yet be industry standards, but they at least can inform your choice of labels. For example, in a recent competitive analysis of eight financial services sites, “personal finance” was found to be more or less a de facto label compared to its synonyms. Such data may discourage you from using a different label.

Figure 6-12 shows labeling systems from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, and IBM, all competing in the PC business. Do you notice a trend here?

Figure 6-12. Labeling systems from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, and IBM

Controlled vocabularies and thesauri

Another great source is existing controlled vocabularies and thesauri (a topic we’ll cover in depth in Chapter 9). These especially useful resources are created by professionals with library or subject-specific backgrounds, who have already done much of the work of ensuring accurate representation and consistency. These vocabularies are often publicly available and have been designed for broad usage. You’ll find these to be most useful for populating labeling systems used for indexing content.

But here’s a piece of advice: seek out narrowly focused vocabularies that help specific audiences to access specific types of content. For example, if your site’s users are computer scientists, a computer science thesaurus “thinks” and represents concepts in a way your users are likely to understand, more so than a general scheme like the Library of Congress subject headings would.

A good example of a specific controlled vocabulary is the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Thesaurus. This thesaurus was designed, as you’d guess, to describe the domain of education. An entry in the ERIC Thesaurus for “scholarships” is shown in Figure 6-13.

Figure 6-13. Controlled vocabularies and thesauri are rich sources of labels

If your site has to do with education or if your audience is comprised of educators, you might start with ERIC as the source for your site’s labels. You can use a thesaurus like ERIC to help you with specific labeling challenges, like determining a better variant for a particularly knotty label. You might go as far as to license the entire vocabulary and use it as your site’s labeling system.

Unfortunately, there aren’t controlled vocabularies and thesauri for every domain. Sometimes you may find a matching vocabulary that emphasizes the needs of a different audience. Still, it’s always worth seeing if a potentially useful controlled vocabulary or thesaurus exists before creating labeling systems from scratch. Try these four excellent lists as you hunt for sources of labels:

• Taxonomy Warehouse: http://taxonomywarehouse.com/

• ThesauriOnline (American Society of Indexers): http://www.asindexing.org/site/thesonet.shtml

• Controlled vocabularies (Michael Middleton): http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~middletm/cont_voc.html

• Web Thesaurus Compendium (Barbara Lutes): http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/~lutes/thesoecd.html

When there are no existing labeling systems or when you need to do more customizing than you’d expected, you face the tougher challenge of creating labeling systems from scratch. Your most important sources are your content and your site’s users.

Indirectly from users

Most organizations—especially those whose sites include search engines—are sitting on top of reams of user data that describe their needs. Analyzing those search queries can be a hugely valuable way to tune labeling systems, not to mention diagnose a variety of other problems with your site. Additionally, the recent advent of folksonomic tagging has also created a valuable, if indirect, source of data on users’ needs that can help information architects develop labeling systems.

Search-log analysis

Search-log analysis (also known as search analytics) is one of the least intrusive sources of data on the labels your site’s audiences actually use. Analyzing search queries^[5] is a great way to understand the types of labels your site’s visitors typically use (see Table 6-5). After all, these are the labels that users use to describe their own information needs in their own language. You may notice the use (or lack thereof) of acronyms, product names, and other jargon, which could impact your own willingness to use jargony labels. You might notice that users’ queries use single or multiple terms, which could affect your own choice of short or long labels. And you might find that users simply aren’t using the terms you thought they would for certain concepts. You may decide to change your labels accordingly, or use a thesaurus-style lookup to connect a user-supplied term (e.g., “pooch”) to the preferred term (e.g., “dog”).

Table 6-5. The top 40 most common queries from Michigan State University’s site, February 8 – 14, 2006; each query tells us something about what the majority of users seek most often and how they label their information needs

Rank	Count	Cumulative	Percent of total	Query
1	1184	1184	1.5330	capa
2	1030	2214	2.8665	lon+capa
3	840	3054	3.9541	study+abroad
4	823	3877	5.0197	angel
5	664	4541	5.8794	lon-capa
6	656	5197	6.7287	library
7	584	5781	7.4849	olin
8	543	6324	8.1879	campus+map
9	530	6854	8.8741	spartantrak
10	506	7360	9.5292	cata
11	477	7837	10.1468	housing
12	467	8304	10.7515	map
13	462	8766	11.3496	im+west
14	409	9175	11.8792	computer+store
15	399	9574	12.3958	state+news
16	395	9969	12.9072	wharton+center
17	382	10351	13.4018	chemistry
18	346	10697	13.8498	payroll
19	340	11037	14.2900	breslin+center
20	339	11376	14.7289	honors+college
21	339	11715	15.1678	calendar
22	334	12049	15.6002	human+resources
23	328	12377	16.0249	registrar
24	327	12704	16.4483	dpps
25	310	13014	16.8497	breslin
26	307	13321	17.2471	tuition
27	291	13612	17.6239	spartan+trak
28	289	13901	17.9981	menus
29	273	14174	18.3515	uab
30	267	14441	18.6972	academic+calendar
31	265	14706	19.0403	im+east
32	262	14968	19.3796	rha
33	262	15230	19.7188	basketball
34	255	15485	20.0489	spartan+cash
35	246	15731	20.3674	loncapa
36	239	15970	20.6769	sparty+cash
37	239	16209	20.9863	transcripts
38	224	16433	21.2763	psychology
39	214	16647	21.5534	olin+health+center
40	206	16853	21.8201	cse+101

Tag analysis

The recent explosion in sites that employ folksonomic tagging (i.e., tags supplied by end users) means another useful indirect source of labels for you to learn from. In many of these sites, users’ tags are publicly viewable. When you display them in aggregate, you’ll find a collection of candidate labels that approximates the results of a free-listing exercise. Additionally, the data that comes from tag analysis can be used in much the same way as search-log analysis. Look for common terms, but also look for jargon, acronyms, and tone; even misspellings are useful if you’re building a controlled vocabulary.

In the examples shown in Figures 6-14 and 6-15, you might be wondering how to develop labels for a new web-based iPod accessories store. To start, you might look at a popular folksonomic system like del.icio.us and see whether users have tagged a few common iPod accessories, and what terms they used. Let’s try a pair of iPod accessories, a radio remote and a leather case. After searching both terms in del.icio.us, we found a variety of results, and chose those that had been bookmarked the most times.

Figure 6-14. Griffin Technology’s IPod Radio Remote (as tagged by 298 del.icio.us users)

Figure 6-15. Vaja’s leather products for PDAs (as tagged by 92 del.icio.us users)

Some of the tags are too broad to be particularly useful (e.g., “iPod” or “shopping”). But some will help you determine labels for categories; in the first example, “hardware” is more common than “media.” Knowing that will clarify your category labeling. In the second example, you might choose “case” over the less popular “cases” as a product label.

Your list of labels might be raw, coming straight from the content in your site, another site, your site’s users, or your own ideas of what should work best. Or, it may come straight from a polished controlled vocabulary. In any case, it’ll need some work to become an effective labeling system.

First, sort the list of terms alphabetically. If it’s a long list (e.g., from a search log), you’ll likely encounter some duplicates; remove these.

Then review the list for consistency of usage, punctuation, letter case, and so forth, considering some of the consistency issues discussed earlier in this chapter. For example, you’ll remember that the label table drawn from the jetBlue web site had inconsistencies that were immediately obvious: sometimes there were periods after labels, sometimes there weren’t; the usage of link labels versus the heading labels on the corresponding pages was inconsistent; and so on. This is a good time to resolve these inconsistencies and to establish conventions for punctuation and style.

Decisions about which terms to include in a labeling system need to be made in the context of how broad and how large a system is required. First, determine if the labeling system has obvious gaps. Does it encompass all the possibilities that your site may eventually need to include?

If, for example, your e-commerce site currently allows users to search only a portion of your product database, ask yourself if eventually it might provide access to all products. If you’re not certain, assume it will, and devise appropriate labels for the additional products.

If the site’s labeling system is topical, try to anticipate the topics not yet covered by the site. You might be surprised to see that the addition of these “phantom” labels has a large impact on your labeling system, perhaps even requiring you to change its conventions. If you fail to perform this predictive exercise, you might learn the hard way that future content doesn’t fit into your site because you’re not sure how to label it, or it ends up in cop-out categories such as “Miscellaneous,” “Other Info,” and the classic “Stuff.” Plan ahead so that labels you might add in the future don’t throw off the current labeling system.

Of course, this planning should be balanced with an understanding of what your labeling system is there to accomplish today. If you try to create a labeling system that encompasses the whole of human knowledge (instead of the current and anticipated content of your web site), don’t plan on doing anything else for the rest of your life. Keep your scope narrow and focused enough so that it can clearly address the requirements of your site’s unique content, the special needs of its audiences, and the business objective at hand, but be comprehensive within that well-defined scope. This is a difficult pursuit, to be sure; all balancing acts are. Consider it justification #64 for information architects—like yourself—to be paid well.

Finally, remember that the labeling system you launch will need to be tweaked and improved shortly thereafter. That’s because labels represent a relationship between two things—users and content—that is constantly morphing. Stuck between two moving targets, your labeling system will also have to change. So be prepared to perform user tests, analyze search logs on a regular basis, and adjust your labeling system as necessary.