“Avoid Ambiguity” sounds simple enough – who wants to be ambiguous? But even that bastion of verbal clarity Apple occasionally trips up. See an example ambiguity in action and contrast it with the clarity of StikiPad’s sign-up form. Read on…
1 CommentCategory: Best Practices
Low-contrast colour palettes may be fashionable, but they won’t do you much good if your designers love them while your customers can’t read them. Ken Schafer shows us examples of what to do and what not to do – yes Apple, we’re talked to you!
Comments closedh3. Best Practice
bq. Use human readable URLs
h3. Rationale
This is human readable:
http://www.bestbuy.com/electronics/research
This is not:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=cat12074&type=page&categoryRep=cat03000
The problem with complex URLs is three-fold:
# A human cannot “reverse engineer” a URL to figure out where they are in the site or what might be “one level higher”. Human readable URLs allow you to “cut off” the end of the URL and get to a higher level in the site. URLs that reflect the site’s page layout also act as a secondary way-finding tool.
# It is hard to share URLs that are not human readable. If you cut and paste a complex URL into an e-mail to share it, often the URL will break in two because it is too long to fit on one line. This creates a broken link for the recipient.
# Some search engines have a hard time with overly complex URLs and you may find that many of your pages are not accessible to search engine “bots” looking for your content.