No other single factor causes greater customer frustration and dissatisfaction than confusing menus and links.
The root cause of most confusing menus and links is organizational language and thinking. Take, for example, the FAQ. Over the years, most customers don’t even know what an FAQ is. That certainly came as a surprise as the common thought was that everyone knew that FAQ meant Frequently Asked Questions. The common thought is everyone knows that, just like everyone knows that the logo is a link to the homepage.
However, the FAQ has a deeper problem. From a customers’ perspective it is essentially a useless link. It is a classic example of organization-centric language. Take for an example trying to renew your TV subscription. You are offered two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs. Which should your choose? On another website you were given two different choices: Frequently Asked Questions; Most Frequently Asked Questions.
How about the link “Useful Links?” Is that a very useful link? What are all the other links? Useless Links? And what about “Quick Links?” Are the other links Slow Links? And what about “Tools”? Is that helpful? When you go to an airline website are you looking for a tool or are you looking to book a flight?.
It’s incredibly hard to create clear menus and links that are truly customer centric because there is an intense pressure to be organization-centric. We were trying to simplify the links in one website recently and an IT person became quite agitated. “We have to have a Tools section,” he said, “because that’s what we look after and we need that section so that we can have proper control over it.”
But if we have a Tools section, shouldn’t we also have a section called “Stuff,” or “Content” or “Information” or “Infinity and Beyond”?
The web team’s single greatest challenge is to truly think like and use the language of the customer. However, there is great pressure is to think like and use the language of the organization.
Naming things based on your internal working structure is fine in certain cases. But when you want to make these things public you need to rethink how you organize and name them.