[Sigia-l] labeling conundrum

[Louise Hewitt]

You could always keep the old one and add your new one
=
"global navigation toolbar"

semantic accuracy maintained; no-one has to compromise; documentation
still correct.

:-)

Lou.

On 2/16/06, Samantha Bailey <samantha at baileysorts.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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