[Sigia-l] verbs in labels

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Peter Merholz wrote:

>  - Assess Your Needs
>  - Find Products
>  - Implement
>  - Get Training
> etc...
>
> Through our work, we decided that it would be okay to mix action labels
> (Assess Your Needs) with thing labels (Training). One that we kept as an
> action label was "Find Products."
>
> Well, that proved problematic. Because users would look at the navigation
> with the word "Products" in mind, and so were scanning for the letter "P",
> and not finding it.
>
> So, the word "Find" was dropped, and it was just "Products".

Retrieving information is pretty much the default action when you click on
a link on the web.  Verbs are generally useful to distinguish from that
default.

There's an interesting ambiguity between the verb as imperative to the
server and the verb as description of what the user does by clicking,
where the server is viewed as a passive tool.

Andrew McNaughton




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Andrew McNaughton           In Sydney
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