[Sigia-l] "General" as a category
Donna Maurer
donna at maadmob.net
Thu Jun 17 02:27:27 EDT 2004
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
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