[Sigia-l] length of nav labels

[Amanda French]

It sounds utterly weird to me that links of 7-12 words would perform 
better than shorter links, which can be made to "pop" both verbally and 
visually. Even 5-9 words sounds like a lot. I'm open to being 
convinced, but I'd want to read the research myself. What report is it 
in? Or can you give an example of a site that uses long links well?

Amanda


On Aug 8, 2005, at 1:29 PM, Jared M. Spool wrote:
>
> Actually, our 7-12 guideline *didn't* come from either Tulving or 
> Miller.
>
> It came from *our* analysis of more than 3,000 clickstreams, where we 
> compared the success of the clickstreams to the number of words in 
> each link that appeared in the clickstreams. Clickstreams that 
> contained links with 7 to 12 words were far more likely to end in 
> success.
>
> (We looked at dozens of other variables, like the types of words, the 
> placement of the underline portion of the link, the color of the link, 
> and many, many others. Link length was the strongest predictor of 
> success.)
>
>

-----
Amanda L. French, Ph.D.
CLIR Post-Doctoral Fellow in
Scholarly Information Resources

Digital Library Initiatives
NCSU Libraries, Box 7111
Raleigh, NC 27695-7111
Tel: 919-513-0211
Fax: 919-515-3031
Mob: 720-530-7515
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~alfrench