[Sigia-l] verbs in labels

Livia Labate liv at livlab.com
Sat Jun 21 12:06:35 EDT 2003


> Richard Wiggins
: Do folks have any thoughts as to when it's appropriate to
: use a participle form instead of a present tense action verb?


I personally feel that the infinitive/present[*] is best when it labels an
action (a task) the user is going to perform within the site itself, like
your example "Adjust your personal data", whereas something related to an
outside activity might be better described with nouns like "Campus Tours".

It just occurred to me that, Touring the Campus might be descriptive of a 3D
campus view on the Web site. In that case I'd label it differently, like
"Virtual Campus Tour" or something like it - it is still not a 'task' per
se.

[*] Interestingly, the English language has the benefit of having the same
word for infinitive and present tenses, which is an added problem in other
languages such as Portuguese, French, Spanish, etc... It is SOOOOOOO much
simpler and easy creating labels in English!

Livia Labate
_______________________________
liv at livlab.com | www.livlab.com




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