Designing Web Navigation

QUESTIONS

1. The following concepts influence label selection. Define each term and provide examples for each:

   1. Homonym

   2. Synonym

   3. Antonym

   4. Polysem

   5. Paronym

   6. Hypernym

   7. Hyponym

2. In their article "The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication," George Furnas and his colleagues propose a simple exercise to demonstrate the chance of two people naming that same object the same way. Try this exercise with several people:

   "On a piece of paper, write the name you would give to a program that tells about interesting activities occurring in some major metropolitan area (e.g., this program would tell you what is interesting to do on Friday or Saturday night). Make the name 10 characters or less. Try t-o think of a name that will be as obvious as possible, one that other people would think of.^[63]"

3. Visit three or four pages on popular e-commerce sites by browsing categories to find a particular product (i.e., don't perform a search). In the table below, record the label used for each element indicated on each page. How do the terms align? What is good about the system? What can be improved? How can the entire system provide a meaningful user experience?

	Page 1	Page 2	Page 3	Page 4
Browse title (at the top of the browser)
URL
Selected navigation
Breadcrumb trail (if present)
Page title (within the main area of the page)

^[63] George Furnas, T.K. Landauer, L.M. Gomez, and Susan Dumais, "The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication,Communications of the ACM 30, 11 (1987): ...