During a trip to Oulu, I made a quick stop in Stockmann’s department store to buy something warm. At the escalator I encountered not just a choice but a puzzle. According to the sign, the first floor offered women’s wear while the second floor features women’s fashion. I asked other customers what the difference was, but none of them knew for sure. So I asked a salesperson. Her interpretation: “women’s wear” includes accessories like scarves and gloves, while “women’s fashion” focuses on clothing.
Retail signage has the same problem as web page menus. How do you label things so that users make the right choices for themselves? It’s all about usability: how quickly and accurately users are able to find what they want or do what they need to. So the general rule is to use everyday, concrete words for menus, labels, and similar guides.
How do we know which words to use? Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen suggests a kind of card game for research. Write your content items on cards. Have a small group of non-experts sort the cards into piles and then give a name to each pile. This tells you how people naturally understand relationships as well as the names they uses for categories.
If Stockmann’s had done this, they’d have found out that at least for me, “women’s wear” includes both scarves and sweaters, whether they’re “fashion” or not.