Mon, Nov 28, 2005

Friendly URLs improve usability and user experience

by Austin Govella

Information architecture is a strategy, not a discipline.

Comments

Information architecture is a strategy, not a discipline. If you like different terms, then the same can be said of user experience.

User experience and information architecture strategy should impact every corner of an organization, the way finance strategy — often called accounting — impacts every level.

As a gateway to everything on the web, URLs form an important part of your user experience strategy. Well-designed URLs possess several qualities that make them an easy to use access point for your websites and applications:

• They’re easy to guess.
  http://yoursite.com/search
• They illustrate site structure.
  http://yoursite.com/search/advanced
• They are easy to verbally communicate.
  (On the phone or in person)
• They’re short enough to paste in an email without wrapping.
  (60 characters or less)
• They look pretty in a catalog, brochure, or other document.
• They should be easy to remember if they come up in conversation around the water cooler.
• They’re easy to type.

In keeping with the focus of user-centered design, URLs should be easy to use in the contexts where they’ll be used. URLs are for people.

Double your fun

One of the greatest things about URLs? You don’t have to choose just one.

Typically, you can get away with duplicating site architecture. For example, http://yoursite.com/search should take you to the Search page. http://yoursite.com/search/advanced should take you to Advanced Search.

Site Map and Site Index may live beneath the Search section of your website, and http://yoursite.com/search/sitemap and http://yoursite.com/search/siteindex may take you there, but you might want a special URL for each:

• http://yoursite.com/sitemap, and
• http://yoursite.com/siteindex

Similarly, Feedback lives beneath the Contact section, but you want the Feedback page accessible through both http://yoursite.com/contact/feedback and http://yoursite.com/feedback.

Catch typos and alternate versions

Selling cars? What URL should shoppers use to find Hummers?

1. /hummer
2. /h2
3. /humvee
4. all of the above

Along similar lines, savvy administrators allow several URLs to access the same website:

• www.yoursite.com
• ww.yoursite.com
• w.yoursite.com
• yoursite.com

(Another good practice is to force all URLs to lowercase. That way, no matter what they enter, and no matter your current or future web server, everyone ends up at the same place.)

Better URLs are easy

Generating friendly URLs is especially important if you design an application that allows people to add content to a website. URL rewriting is a commonplace occurence on web servers, and easy to do with server-side programming.

On a project I worked on this Summer, we generated several URLs for each piece of content. Pages could be accessed by title, id, or site structure, and if they wanted, users could specify alternative URLs. Similarly, appending rss, atom, pdf, or xls to a URL generates that page in the specified format. (Xls only worked for pages with data tables.)

Make URLs as easy as possible. If having more than one makes it easier for someone, then add another. The development cost if trivial.

The benefit to the global experience, as well as the greater usability of friendly URLs outweighs the minuscule development cost. Start specifying friendly URLs when designing websites and applications. A URL column makes a great addition to your content inventory, wireframe, or page description diagram.

Talk About "Friendly URLs improve usability and user experience"