[Sigia-l] "General" as a category

[Donna Maurer]

Given that we were talking about the category of 'miscellaneous' this 
week, I thought I'd tell you about something interesting I just noticed.

I've been watching recordings of a usability test of a part of an 
intranet that I did last week. One of the categories in the main nav bar 
was 'General'. It was located at the far right of a horizontal 
navigation bar, so to me looked like a 'miscellaneous' category - a 
place for the things that they couldn't place.

In the testing, there were a couple of scenarios that needed information 
from this category. To my surprise, all participants found it. At first 
I thought that it was because it was at the far right - they read all of 
the other headings, didn't get a good feeling from them, so looked at 
the general category. However, on re-watching the sessions, I realised 
that something different happened. They didn't always read across the 
navigation, so this category wasn't always being checked as a last 
resort. Instead, it actually described what was beneath it quite well. 
All of the other categories had information that was quite specific. 
This one, however, contained information that was much broader, much 
more 'general' in nature. So it did describe the information better than 
I had originally thought.

This links in somewhat with Peter's comment about 'everything else' 
categories being valid and expected from a cognitive psych perspective. 
In this case, the 'everything else' category is at a different 
conceptual level, which is possibly why it works both as a category and 
for the users...

....maybe


-- 
Donna Maurer
e: donna at maadmob.net
blog: http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/
AIM: maadmob