[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

[Laura Norvig]

At 6:22 PM -0400 4/11/01, PeterV wrote:
>If a user encounters something that they already encountered 
>"somewhere else", then they will be confused because:
>- Is it the same information? Or slightly different?
>- Which one is correct, this one or the "other" one?


I think the greatest confusion can lie if they are looking at a list 
of links right up front, and they're seeing Tomato both under fruit 
and vegetable. It's just jarring and *automatically* brings up the 
question of whether or not the content will be the same. My first 
assumption as a user, before taking/wasting the time to 
click-through, would be that the content *must* be different, else 
why would it be listed twice?


>  You get a similar problem when using anchor links: things aren't on 
>clearly a "page" anymore, which gets confusing (when bookmarking, 
>when moving around through links, ...). Still, I'm not sure how much 
>of a problem it really is.

This is a pretty big pet peeve of mine as a user and as someone who 
needs to give people reference URLs quite often. The increasing use 
of database-driven sites (sometimes in cases where static would 
easily suffice) and the accompanying use of *ungodly* long and 
unwieldy URLs (I think really good programmers can minimize this but 
I've yet to see it) drives me insane ...

Laura Norvig, MLIS
"Intelligent Human Agent"
lauran at etr.org