Making Internet Content Easy to Use

Posted by arlene

Which is more frustrating to people in search of help with style: having to flip through pages of badly organized and cryptically indexed rules, or having to scroll through long screenfuls of unsearchable items with many irrelevant links to get to the point? It’s a wash. Very few people read style guides for fun.

What you’ll learn here about online navigation has implications for print, too. It’s hard to beat great categorical organization and a great index, and it’s hard to beat an intelligent keyword search capability based on HTML with supplemental material in a PDF to show examples of graphics (forms, list styles, address formats, acceptable color and fonts, logos, and the like). In both mediums, these are the most important things to build in:

• Recognizable lists or categories of problems and choices
• Logically cross-referenced answers that can be located quickly
• Examples that make distinctions, exceptions, and applications clear

One of the biggest challenges in writing an online style guide is placing intelligent links. The trick is to embed them in the natural conversational flow of a statement—the Yale Style Guide calls it parenthetical placement—so the link makes logical sense without interrupting.

Avoid saying, “Click here for more examples of dangling modifiers.” Avoid giving the imperative “Click,” period. Why? It’s distracting—when someone is trying to find information, it’s annoying to be commanded to go somewhere else for it.

Group all minor links and footnotes at the bottom of a section, not in the main text. Phrase important links in this manner: Watch out for misplaced modifiers—dangling, wandering, and squinting—that create unwittingly humorous descriptions.

One of the best resources for intelligent online design is still the classic Guide to Web Style by Rick Levine, published by Sun Microsystems.

If users can zero in on the questions they need answered by using keyword searches or creating bookmarks to the topics that perennially trouble them, they’ll be less likely to “wing it” or “go by ear,” two great ways to sabotage a style guide. And what an online style can do that even the best-indexed paper version can’t is offer rapid and comprehensive searching and cross-referencing.

As the Yale Style Guide puts it, an intranet should let you “get in, get what you want, and move on.” The section on intranet site design will be useful for any editor who is not familiar with the principles of online usability and navigation; here’s the gist: “Successful intranet sites assemble useful information, organize it into logical systems, and deliver the information in an efficient manner” [emphasis ours]. For more, go to http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/ manual/sites/intranet_design.html.

Time is money, especially when employees are trying to find an answer so they can get back to work. The single most important aspect to keep in mind when creating content for an online guide is the user. Providing navigation from place to place and interactive links within pages will help users get a sense of “you are here,” without which “over there” may seem irrelevant instead of enriching.

A good overview of intranets in general—how and why to set them up and what the benefits, obstacles, and system requirements are—can be found at intranetroadmap.com, where an intranet service provider has provided an Intranet Road Map. A statistic quoted on the site: “Two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies had an intranet as long ago as July 1996, according to the site, but who knows how many contained a companywide style guide. In our experience, some surprisingly high-profile, respected organizations and companies are winging it when it comes to quality control—or making arbitrary decisions that change with each new guard.”

The truth is, online style guides don’t rank high in the mind of anyone who isn’t engaged in quality control of publications. But for those of us charged with saving organizational face and trying hard not to reinvent the wheel each time we edit a document, they’re essential,

The Yale Style Guide says, “Graphic user interfaces were designed to give people direct control over their personal computers…. The goal is to provide for the needs of all your potential users, adapting Web technology to their expectations, and never requiring the readers to simply conform to an interface that puts unnecessary obstacles in their paths.”

Here’s a summary of what an efficient intranet site tries to do to speed users through the search and skim processes basic to consulting a style guide:

• Provide menus; tables of contents; button bars that let users go back, forward, or return to the opening page or a related menu page; and short summaries of what can be found on other pages. In short, give people who search differently a choice of paths leading to the same information.
• Highlight keywords, write meaningful heads and subheads, and incorporate a limited number of relevant links. (Too many links discourage users; irrelevant links infuriate them.)
• Be concise, organize information into short paragraphs, and don’t use a line length the entire width of the screen. (On most monitors, there is a little bit of the “page” that a user can’t see. Make sure vital information appears in the upper half of the screen.)
• Use hypertext links to accommodate the needs of many different users working on different types of publications for different media. Links will lead users to relevant pages for their particular project and allow them to bypass the rest, avoiding a sense of “too much information.”
• If these basic ideas are new conceptual territory for you, it’s time to have a meeting with your favorite resident programmer or webmaster to explain the scope and use of the guide you have in mind and to ask for help. Before you begin compiling content, think about how it must be organized for searching and linking, and learn enough about screen design to avoid simply parking a print piece online and failing to take advantage of interactivity and navigation tools.

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