"But UIE has strong data showing that longer links work better." - A
Aaah, you see I have this rule. Under certain conditions anything can be possible. What are important are those conditions. Firstly I haven't read the book "The scent of Information", but it looks very interesting and I definitely would love to read it. What I did pick up was some contradiction: "Longer is Better. What is the optimal length of a link? How long should your pages be? Looking at the data we’ve collected in thousands of clickstreams, you’ll see exactly how long your links and pages should be, including insightful examples from CNN and Sprint.com. " If longer is better, how can there be a specific optimal length? Wouldn't long as possible be the optimal length? Secondly, I think people navigate differently when they visit different type of sites (Entertainment, News, eCommerce or Research sites) or depending on their goals. News sites without exception link their whole description when they give a list of news highlights. News is about grabbing attention, marketing, descriptive words, etc. If I am looking for information on a specific hotel and I end up on a blog which refers to the hotel in a link, but not by name but by a description "excellent hotel". How does this inform the user that this link would go to the specific hotel he was looking for. My hamburger example work as a link, because of marketing reasons (its funny, purple cow attributes) and not because the link was long. If I was looking for hamburgers I would have skipped the link, because I didn't see the relevance to my search. You don't see Amazon advertising Harry Potter in their text with a link from "Young Boy waves his magic stick the fifth time". They link it from "Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix." The first link will work on my blog if I want to boost my affiliate income, but do marketing manipulation techniques improve usability? Good question. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
