adam darowski had some interesting things to say on thet subject of using URLs and links in your design and how to effectively get your content out there with the proper use of links. adam is a user experience designer at batchblue software. i really have no idea who this guy is, but his article about links was interesting enough for me to blog about. he must be pretty good. here are a few excerpts i found interesting from the article.
“computer users have gotten so used to the graphical user interface (GUI) that it is easy to forget that computers basically operate via a series of commands. the web has not only brought the command line back to the surface, it has exposed the concept to an entire generation of users that has never seen a command line.”
“if i visit amazon.com and search for the album rock action by mogwai, I am directed to a page with this URL (line break mine):
http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/
ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1203311335&sr=8-1my first question was “how much of this is needed to access the page and how much session information amazon is capturing?” well, turns out that the URL really is:
http://amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/
what’s good about this is that it has the artist and title of the album in the URL. what isn’t so nice is the extra stuff that means nothing to me, the user. I’m sure it means something to amazon, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be exposed on the front end.”
“if people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. they’re not browsing anymore. they are power users. they know what they want. give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.”
you can read the entire article here.
you can check out his blog here.
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