All those results are pages about “click here, do this, do that”. Why do people still use that on a website?

“Click here” is one of those text fragments that seem to stick around. Webdesigners and usability experts recommend not using it and still, everyone does, including Adobe. Adobe Acrobat reader is the first item on Google SERPs for “click here”. Simply because it is used in plenty of links on a huge number of sites.

All I can see is that people are using it, and that there is no tendency that tells me it is dying.
So why not? Why do people still use it? Dismissing it as stupidity or lack of knowledge is too easy. There must be some reason why people still use it even though there are plenty of reasons not to.

Content-editors still use it because it’s clear. It is clear what a visitor must do. Not what the visitors will get after the click. But that really doesn’t matter because through all the noise (the internet) this person found your website, scanned it thoroughly, found what he was looking for, and followed the instruction. What’s behind the link, who knows? Does anyone care?

The text fragment works more or less like an embedded command: “When you click this link, you will know more about the subject than others do.” The link becomes more attractive: it states what you should do.

People scan for underlined blue text. The link text “click here” enforces the concept of the link and the click becomes a jump into the unknown.

To click is to believe.

I have trained around 200 editors and I repeated it a thousand times:

• that the text of the link should be an indication of the subject of the referring page,
• that it is is not good for usability/accessibility and SEO,
• that it is uninformative

“Click here” as link text is not going away in the near future even though it is disregarded as bad practice by practitioners of IA, usability and SEO. The concept is too easy to understand. It almost feels natural.

Links should be informative about where you’ll take the visitor, but it seems that using verbs as links is very powerful.

Tell them what to do

And then you get this facebook button: “like”. It’s the same thing, just better. Emotional. The link instructs. Like or die clicking!

The facebook like button instructs you to like – read click – the button. It doesn’t say “I like”, it doesn’t say “click here to like”, it’s just “like”.

Implicitly I translate it to “I like”, as must people do (disagree with me ?). But it is nothing more or less than an embedded command: like.

The simplicity of the concept “telling people what to do” is definitely the main reason why the “click here” link is not fading away. Even though the text fragment is pretty powerful, the reasons not to use it still prevail. Click here to comment.

So I looked around, found a few articles on the subject, and I bought a book.
The book “The Elements of Content Strategy” written by Erin Kissane published by A Book Apart.

I devoured the book: short and concise writing and it provides a clear picture of the relationship with other functions in the webteam (editors, IAs, designers, etc..). I was happy to discover that the section of useful resources has a list of books that I had read or own:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Lou Rosenfeld,
• Don’t make me think by Steve Krug,
• The Elements of User Experience by Jess James Garret and
• Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley.

Seems I should have some idea of what content strategy is, right?

The book explains a few things about Content strategists. Basically a CS thinks about the who, what, where and why of content.

Who will publish that document?
Editors need to be trained, and the document needs to go through a process, formal or informal, to make sure it is properly published. Document life-cycle is part of what a CS does, but that is also what IA’s do, right? Designing workflows in a CMS, how to reuse content, which content to reuse, that is also part of the IA tasks.

What are you going to publish?
Data and content are pretty abundant if you know where to look for. But that doesn’t mean everything has to go online. Here the tasks of a CS and IA start to differ in that the IA does not always have a grip on the actual content.

Where are you going to publish it?
Content can be reused and rewritten for different channels. If you are posting it on twitter, Facebook, an RSS feed or a webpage, the CS considers which parts of the text goes online. Maybe even the tone and voice of the content has to be reviewed.

I think here the CS tasks start to get borderline with SEO tasks and/or journalism. One good examples of this overlap can be seen at the BBC and how they produce headlines. Most of the headlines convey the whole story in 5 words. Is that good copywriting? a content strategists defining standards? or the SEO requiring the most prominent keywords to be available in the titles? I guess journalists have been doing this already for a long long time.

Why are you going to publish this?
The strategy, the why behind the content should be become clear after stakeholder interviews and audience analyses.
The strategy should bring those 2 mindsets together. Here the idea is the same as in IA: align the mental model of the business with the mindset of the audience.

In chapter 3 the author lists a batch of deliverables (Channel strategy , CMS requirements, Communication plans , Usability tests) and I think the majority of those documents need to be shared with the IA.

Both the the IA and the CS perform user research, create content inventories, write up persona’s, the shared list of tools goes on and on. But I think the content strategists focuses more on the message behind, the voice and tone of the content and for that matter I think the CS is very close to a graphic designer. Choosing the colors and images can drastically change the messages that a website conveys. The tone and voice of the content can do the same.

A wireframe is a black and white presentation of what will be published where. But the message can be so dramatically changed by choosing the wrong words or the right ones. The wireframe can act as a reference but the if the design uses pink tones and cartoon images, or corporate blue and stock photography, the message is no longer the same.

Content strategy is nothing new, it has been done from the moment books were published, radio started to broadcast and television shows were brought into the living room. Yes, the environment has changed, so the tools and techniques need to change too but basically it is a new name for what was considered part of other professions.

Update

An excerpt of the book The Elements of Content Strategy is now online at A List Apart

I couldn’t remember exactly how the story went, so I had to look it up. It’s just a small footnote, but it says everything about the position of the webteam in todays corporate culture. I think it still holds a lot of truth these days.

I once saw a particularly puzzling feature on the Home page of a prominent – and otherwise sensible designed – site. When I asked about it, I was told, “Oh that. It came to our CEO in a dream, so we had to add it.” True story
Steve Krug, Don’t make me think (2006), p.127

And Steve Krug is the not the only one expressing these thoughts. You can find comparable comments made by Oliver Reichenstein over at http://www.informationarchitects.jp/

The concern about the visual style is the echo of the nineties; the nineties are over. It’s well documented that often top decision makers and silly corporate structures mess with the design process. Let me state this clearly: Just because you drive a car it doesn’t make you a car engineer. In other words–CEOs shouldn’t get involved in web design, but in web business strategy.
What’s Next in Web Design? by Oliver Reichenstein

Over time open source software grew in popularity, attracting a diverse population of users beyond developers. When new users who were less technically savvy began using developer-centered software, it became the tipping point at which open source software went from having an “advanced user interface” to a “bad user interface”. However, software development continued to focus on functionality and features instead of improving the user interface.
Usability in Open Source Software

I ditched Ubuntu the first time I used it because it wasn’t user-friendly enough. That was 2 years ago.

Now I tried and installed it on 2 computers and planning to install v6 on my old iMac because they actually made a lot of usability improvements.
The interface looks nice, the installation process went through without any problems, and they have all the software I need (a browser: Firefox, word-processing and spreadsheets: OpenOffice, mediaplayers:VLC, Songbird … )and I can install them without (too m)any problems.

There is really no reason not to use Linux/Ubuntu for home use.

The first thing on the list is FAILING TO CONSIDER THE END USER.

This sounds like an obvious one and it is, but still, it’s the first step to take.
I work at a Corporate HQ far away from the people who actually use the systems I create, and I experience this all the time. If I don’t take the time to go over and have a look, talk to them and see what they actually want, it always results in a merely functional rather then a usable and functional system.

1. FAILING TO CONSIDER THE END USER
When I’m hired to design a Point of Sale system, I always start with Field Studies—visits to actual sites where the cashiering system will be used. I nearly always find that the system doesn’t match employee processes, and that the employees have developed ways to “get around” the system and/or make up for system limitations.

Observing employees and conducting interviews at representative business sites are a critical first step in designing a quick and efficient POS system that reduces both errors and training time. Site visits also help ensure a redesign that considers the employee environment, including physical space constraints, distractions, etc.
How to Design a System that Everybody Hates

The Ecommerce Usability for Valentine Etailers report evaluates the websites of 20 of the leading Valentine’s ecommerce websites. Based on our experience of usability testing with over 1000 people on a variety of ecommerce sites, we devised 20 essential guidelines that all ecommerce websites should adhere to, evaluating each site against these guidelines.
Ecommerce Usability for Valentine Etailers

My personal favorites is generated by Lotus notes: Mail engine: no error.

Some useful guidelines for printing error messages can be found on the Cranky Users article: could you repeat that in English, or the guidelines for error messages from Norman Nielsens’ alertbox.

Jacob ziet er echt uit als een verstrooide professor: net uit de strip van Jommeke gesprongen.

Het interview geeft wel een beter inzicht in een aantal publicaties van Jacob en hij herhaalt verschillende elementen die je steeds terug vind in zijn Alertbox.

• Developers zijn niet de users. En dat is iets dat je overal terug vind. En ik vrees dat de meeste usability specialisten/webmasters/Ias/… dat ook niet zijn.
• Dus, voor een test heb je een echte user nodig. Geen fancy lab met eyetracking, gewoon een tafel, papier en pen, een luisterend oor.
• De interviewer vraagt om enkele goed en slecht websites aan te halen. De eerst die hij aanhaalt is Yahoo. Groot bedrijf, veel inzicht in users, focus op de users en noden.
  De tweede website die hij vermeld is die van Victorias Secret. Volgens Jacob een website waar je schoenen kan kopen. :-) Wel …, vreemde schoenen naar mijn mening, maar ik kon effe niet meer van het lachen.
• Dan krijgen we een uitleg over PDF. Dit interview verduidelijkt zijn standpunt over PDF als print medium. PDF werkt niet in een online omgeving waar “paging” en controle over de lay-out van een document weinig of geen betekenis heeft. PDF is niet slecht, PDF is goed om af te drukken.
• De volgende stap is natuurlijk dat search niet werkt wanneer je gigantische pdf documenten online zet. Als je een zoek term invoert ben je op zoek naar iets specifiek en heb je geen zin om te wachten en die 500 Mb PDf handleiding te downloaden. Search is inderdaad een onderschatte tool voor de meeste website. De meeste gratis search engines kan je dan ook beter verwijderen van je website. Als je de search engine niet kan aanpassen aan de noden van je website en van je gebuikers kan je de search feature beter achterwege laten.

The author, Jeff Johnson, has written another blooper book on GUI design and released chapter 4 for download. This chapter handles text and linking, scent, labeling and using the right words.

So, if you were to start designing this page from scratch, you’d start here — with the message unit. The subject, the body, the metadata, the link and file attachment styles, etc. Only when that unit is complete would you begin to think about the second most critical element on the page

Jason Fried

The post was published in 2004 but seems still relevant as they posted a pointer to another blog “To-Done” where Britt Parrot writes about a similar technique to get a web design project going: Starting in the middle

And flingmedia uses a similar technique to do audience research.

The idea of putting the focus on the main goal or most important block of the page is interesting enough to try. It certainly worked for basecamp and other apps from 37signals and it is different then other techniques like a Page Description Diagram (PDD) that comes together after exensive research and discussion.