Nomenclature

In the testing phase for a recent release, I received an email from the client's third party development team stating that there was no way to return to the homepage once they clicked on any link off of it. They were having to reload the URL. No way home? How could I have missed that?!

I didn't know what to think. I had run through all of the changes myself, paying particular attention to the navigation just the day before. I immediately loaded the site and checked it out. It was fine, the corporate logo was successfully linking to the homepage on every page I tested. What could the developer have seen that I was missing... JavaScript error? Browser-specific problems?

Then it occurred to me...

In reworking the utility navigation, we had removed the explicit "Home" link. We opted instead to have the corporate logo serve as the link to the home page. We were adding a "Subscribe to Company" link and the area was already pretty full, so we decided to simplify things. It was a convention that we have employed countless times and seen employed countless others. The Utility navigation, for those who use different terms, is what we call a group of global links reserved for user actions (rather than content) grouped together in the header -- things like "Login/Logout", "Subscribe", "Contact Us".

I re-read the developer's email and suspected that I had found the problem. The developer was looking for the "Home" link, not finding it, and reporting it as a bug. I looked down at the signature in the email and saw that I was dealing with a Senior Systems Analyst.

"Solutions" as a primary navigation item.

I recently had a meeting with a prospective client, a software company looking to make some strategic changes to their site. They had previously organized their site by audience and were now looking to focus on their primary audience and bring their product content a level up. "We are thinking that we want the navigation to be "Products", "Solutions"...

What exactly is a "Solution"?

I have seen solutions as:

• product packages
• product/service packages
• hardware/software/service packages
• vertical-specific product packages
• vertical-specific case studies
• product listings for a particular audience
• product offerings for a particular business challenge

What do users think of "Solutions"

I had the opportunity a few years back to do a usability study for a large hardware/software/services company who also offered "solutions". In fact, the goal of the study was to see why a particular division's hardware/software/services offerings were failing to satisfy their users. Part of the problem? Yup, you guessed it... solutions.

We tested both engineers and business decision makers from large and small organizations and found that generally users don't know what to expect when they see the word "Solution" so most shied away from that area, opting to try repeatedly to find the information they sought in the Products area.