3 Common IA Mistakes (that Are All Due to Low Information Scent)

Summary: Vague call-to-action verbs, unnecessary parallel language, and conversational tone of voice used in links and navigation labels are confusing. Use labels with strong information scent instead.

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Jakob Nielsen once said that “life is too short to click on things you don’t understand. This quote sums up how users tend to behave with navigation categories — users won't click on a category unless it’s clear where they will go, before they click. Of course, some will try links out just to see where they lead, but that’s a relatively small subset of users (usually very motivated and in search of something elusive). We find that many people ignore vague link names entirely .

In our information-architecture course , we spend a lot of time talking about creating good labels for navigation menus and links . The concept that we return to over and over is that of strong information scent — the link label must give users a clear sense of what they’re going to find when clicking. We stress that clarity is the most important factor when choosing the words that will represent IA categories.

Here are 3 common IA mistakes that are all rooted in labels with poor information scent.

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