[Sigia-l] labeling conundrum

[Samantha Bailey]

Hi,

An interesting issue has cropped up for me and I'm hoping to get some
quick finger-to-the-wind feedback. We have been working on a new
"global navigation bar" or "page header" for our web-based
product--aka the top 2 inches of the screen where the primary
navigation links live and are consistently presented throughout the
site. We have been calling this project the Global Navigation Bar
Refresh internally. I didn't think I was going to need to have a
name/label for it externally, so I haven't given it much thought.
However, it turns out that we have PRINT documentation (and it $ound$
like there's a lot of it) that has been referring to that area of the
page as the "toolbar" for years (aka; since the product was actual
shrink wrapped software & where toolbar probably was the precisely
right terminology).  Our marketing folks are creating a flash demo and
in the process of trying to decide what to call this they stumbled
onto the documentation issue. The documentation people feel very
strongly that the flash demo needs to call this part of the page the
"toolbar" to correspond to the documentation.

I'm very reluctant to call this a toolbar as I think that "toolbar" is
widely recognized as a widget or collection of functions that can be
added/removed to an application and that enable some kind of
functionality, whereas the navigation bar or menu at the top of the
screen allows you to move throughout the site. I think the dominance
of Google & the Google toolbar at this moment in time further
exacerbates the situation. (Additionally, our competitor has just
launched a toolbar of their own...)
However, doing some searching and poking around it's clear that web
designers refer to the collection of links that lets you move around
the site as navigation bars or navigation menus, but I'm not really
sure about the average user. I know that in usability tests I very
rarely hear a user say "navigation" anything--they usually just point,
call them links or menus. I don't want to make a big stink and have
the company spend a lot of money printing new documentation if this is
a non-important issue--i.e., does it really matter if our
documentation calls the top of the screen a toolbar? It's hard for me
to imagine a scenario in which the users would experience mass
confusion (and we'd just be talking about users who actually use
documentation), so it doesn't seem like a big danger.

But the semantically precise part of me is tied up in knots.

What say you?

Samantha



--
Samantha Bailey | samantha at baileysorts.com | http://baileysorts.com