What’s the best way to label pages on a website?

Last week a client asked me that very question, “What are the best labels to use on this website?” ADGi had been engaged to complete an assessment of the company’s current website's information architecture. To do so we used our proprietary tool, Navtester and compared the results with their site analytics for a three month period that covered the same period as the navigation testing.

The site structure did not test well. This came as no surprise to the client, they had suspected there was an issue but were struggling to really pin it down. The beauty of testing their existing structure was that we now had solid evidence that people are not going to be very successful finding information on their site.

During the ensuing conversation, we were discussing the site structure as a whole, the approach that was currently being used (mainly following their departmental structure) and how the site structure was not really providing the user a scent of information (read Jared Spool’s report on Designing for the Scent of Information)or supporting findability.

Part of the conversation centered around the labeling system they were using and that led to the question. The questioner elaborated asking if it was better to use more marketing-like labels, more task-based labels, or if they should use the labels they use internally.

The answer is ‘It Depends’. There is no one correct approach, and none of those systems of labeling are necessarily wrong nor will they necessarily work. It depends on the overall strategy of the site, who it is aimed at and the intended work the site needs to do. For instance, a tourism site aimed at not only giving the user information about the destination but delivering a sense of discovery and excitement may tend towards using labels that are more marketing driven and use language central to the brand. Whereas an intranet that is very task-oriented, delivered to a closed audience could very successfully use more internal terms because they’d make sense to that audience.

Ask yourself what work is this site supposed to do? Then ask yourself if I were an outsider looking at the website would I get what’s in each bucket?

Here’s an example for our site: on the current site we have a label Group for the staff list and links to our partners. When we were designing the site I chose the label as it fits well with the brand and I wanted to emphasize the team approach we use to do our work. Group suggests much more strongly a team than does the label People and the company name is Analytic Design Group. Turns out I was wrong. In the feedback I’ve been collecting about the site (using the very cool 4 question survey, as well as through Navtester) some of our users are telling us that ‘Group’ doesn’t quite resonate with themthe way I'd intended. The label that I thought was both self explanatory and brand centric turns out to be somewhat confusing to some people.

We have started working on a redesign for the site and I will be adjusting that label. In this case I still want to use the label 'Group' for branding purposes but I will add in some interaction design features and possibly a clarifying additional label such as Group (People) or Group (Team) to make it just that much more obvious.

The goals for your labeling system should be:

• Creating a clear path for your users to follow, ask yourself would the average user understand what content they will find generally in this bucket
• Finding labels that both fit the brand and are unambiguous. Anytime you start leaning toward calling a content grouping Other, Miscellaneous, or FAQ it usually means that you have content that is unrelated in that group, you need to re-think your IA
• Finding labels reflect the IA strategy - so, for example, if you have a topic based structure the labels should be topic based, if the structure is task based, the labels should reflect tasks and be more action oriented