I had an interesting discussion with a co-worker yesterday about file-naming. A given project has pages dedicated to their leadership team and we were deciding how best to name these files of biographical information. Initially I felt very strongly that a page describing Julie Maples should be named jmaples.xxx, since it describes the content. That way if Julie went from general manager to ceo, we could continue to refer to the same page. My coworker felt the pages should be named according to job title, that is, Julie’s information should now live on the gm.xxx page, and if she were to be promoted, it should be removed from that page and added to the ceo.xxx page.

What was interesting about the discussion (I know, it doesn’t sound that interesting right now), is that we were both concerned about the same problem: ensuring users got the information they were seeking. We didn’t want inaccuracies or broken links. From my standpoint, I felt that information about Julie should always be on Julie’s page, regardless of her title. His concern was that people may not even know they were looking for Julie’s information; they would potentially be looking for the GM’s information. If it were Julie or Sam wasn’t the issue.

This issue really arose as we attempted to anticipate the user needs. Why were users going to get this information: the person, or the role? On the navigation of our site, the users’ names are linked, hence my rationale for naming them accordingly. On other sister sites, however, it was quite possible the links would go to “meet the CEO of XYZ company”. My co-worker was looking at how other sites would link to ours. In a closed site (what I was envisioning), when information changed, we would have the control to go in and change information and update links. We lose that control, however, when we become a destination site for other links. From that standpoint, I could see his point.

My next suggestion was to employ server-side redirects, so that someone could access gm.xxx or jmaples.xxx and get Julie’s page now, and if Julie were replaced by Sam, the redirect from gm.xxx would go to Sam’s page. My ever practical co-worker had concerns about introducing another level of changes to be made, although my standpoint remains that it simply should be done.

… I promise, the interesting stuff is coming…..

Ok, the reason why I was still thinking about this today is not because I don’t like to believe others are “more right” than I am, but because I was asking these questions of our copy writer and our information architect, and he said that this was really our (tech) domain. I don’t know about that, and it reminded me of the discussion we had back at LexisNexis about alt vs title vs link text. Who owns that? We had some great discussions about what title text on a link should describe: the destination of the link or the action the user is taking? Is that a copy issue, or more about user flow and interaction? Coming from an accessibility standpoint, I had a very different view than the Human Factors Engineers, since they wanted to “tell a story” and I wanted to let a blind user know where the link went.

As I continue to get more interested in the information architecture side of things, I am starting to see things differently: a page describing Julie Maples isn’t just about Julie Maples, it is also an endpoint for a given user task, it satisfies one or more user needs. So how do we help a user complete that task?