Document title usability?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Becca Price wonders: <<Can anyone cite usability studies about document
titles for me?>>

Interesting concept. I can't recall ever coming across one, but that being
said, you can probably do some of your own low-rent usability via a thought
exercise:

<<Word has come down from On High that we're standardizing our titles, so
I'm being asked to rename my documents as follows: 
*  Comshare (R) MPC(TM) 4.2 Administrator's Guide
*  Comshare (R) MPC(TM) 4.2 Administration Installation Guide
*  Comshare (R) MPC(TM) 4.2 Administration Release Notes
I have a vague feeling that this violates some usability guideline or
another, that the more standard stuff you put at
the beginning of titles the harder it is to differentiate bettween the
documents.>>

Think in terms of simple, short-term memory psychobabble, not usability per
se: the bit about Comshare simply establishes context (i.e., that this isn't
the manual for Word), and from the user perspective, it's the
Administrator's guide they're looking for. The more words you place up
front, the longer it is before the user gets to the actual meat (the type of
guide), and if you put enough words up front, carrying things to their
ridiculous and illogical extreme, the reader will forget what they're
looking for by the time they come to the end of the paragraph-long preamble.
<g> I don't think that's the case here. Complicating this is the fact that,
at least to me, I have no idea what the difference is between the first and
second guide based solely on the title, and that's probably not a good
thing; titles should clearly distinguish between books.

Contextual inquiry suggests that whether the Comshare belongs up front or at
the end might have something to do with how the software is going to be used
and what the prevailing usage is in the industry (i.e., what users are
familiar with). If the users have a 6-foot shelf of books full of software
manuals, or if they're looking for your manuals in a library, alphabetizing
them by product name might make a lot of sense; for example, imagine the
problems if you had 20 "user guides" from different companies, all
alphabetized under "user guide" rather than the product name. (I doubt any
really good librarian would do this, but still...) Moreover, the standard
(based on the manuals I have on my desk) is to cite the product name first,
then define the type of manual. So while your discomfort has a sound basis,
I don't think the management suggestion poses any major problems in this
case.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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