Cognition: Human–Computer Communication - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 210

leads a user to spend more time exploring a web page (or menu item) to find what
they are looking for because the content, metaphorically, 'smells' like the thing
they are looking for. The idea is to make sure that objects and links appear to
smell like what they contain and to not smell like what they do not. In this
way, the user should be able to detect more readily when they are looking in the
right area.
This metaphor of information scent makes several suggestions for design. Thus,
obtuse words or phrases on menus mask the scent; descriptions that are too general
diffuse the scent; descriptions that mislead users have the wrong scent; content that
is hard to find because, perhaps, it is at the bottom of a page, are hard to smell.
7.4.5 Implications for System Design
Understanding information and the ways that users search for and use information
is important if you want to help users carry out their tasks. Research in this area
has provided a perspective that focuses on the material that users are using and
looking for, and gives us another way to think about users and to support design.
If you can understand what users are looking for, it should help you understand
how you can support them in the task of finding it. This can be done through better
interface design to display the information in a way that allows the users to
understand it, which includes providing details about objects to help users find the
information they are looking for directly or by providing information scent trails
through increasingly more specific scents.
It is also worth briefly mentioning Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at this
point. The algorithms that underpin the major Web search engines keep evolving,
but the way that they generally work is quite well known. Web content writers
should be aware of how they work, because they can construct their content in
such a way that it promotes their page in the search results. The number of links
into a page, and keywords, for example, are just two factors that have been used to
increase the ranking of web pages.
7.5 Designing Content
As the web has grown and web pages have proliferated, designers have come to
realize the full importance of content and the way it is structured and delivered.
With so much information now available, users can be overwhelmed, and under-
standably are unwilling to expend significant time and energy trawling through
hundreds of pages of content to find information. The way that content is written,
structured, and delivered is therefore critical to the success of a system. The type of
content you will have, and how it should be structured, will be determined by your
content strategy and information architecture.