An interesting discussion came up this week where there was a debate about the length of menu choices and how short/long options should be to help users move along in both an efficient and successful way through a system.
Interestingly enough, around the same time I ran across an article from Nielsen talking about taking about links and how well can users predict what will be contained within each link. I’ve mentioned in the past that I feel there are many similarities between the web world and the voice world, so thinking along the same lines, I feel web links are the siblings of menu choices in speech, so I felt the part where he talked about the results of only showing the first 11 characters of a link was relevant for that discussion:
The two winning links (“Gift Cards” and “New Custome”) also showcase principles for effective Web content. Both links:
- Use plain language
- Use specific terminology
- Follow conventions for naming common features
- Front-load user- and action-oriented terms
The point being that the importance is not really on the length of the word but on its meaning. For example he found the worse links were the ones that only showed “Introducing” and “Working whi” that had the same length as the winning ones but were bad because of:
- Bland, generic words
- Made-up words or terms
- Starting with blah-blah and deferring the information-carrying text to the end
What this means in practice is that using single word commands on a menu (e.g. “Emergency”, “Billing”, “Status”) does not necessarily make menu choices easier to understand, more intuitive for users, or faster to navigate. On the contrary, they may limit the user’s ability to infer what can be found underneath them, creating the exact opposite effect.
JTLYK 
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