The notions of ‘information scent’ and ‘information shape’ are in Kalbach’s view both crucial to effective web navigation.
The concept of ’scent’ is (as the term is presumably meant to convey) difficult to define concretely. Kalbach says it ‘refers to how well links and navigation match a visitor’s information need and how well they predict the content on the destination page’. He also, however, quotes Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan to the effect that scent is a quality compounded of many ingredients that adds up to a ’sense of confidence in navigating’.
Of particular interest in creating this sense of confidence is the powerful role of keywords and labels – users rely a great deal on the rapid scanning of a page for relevant labels in navigating, and this is furthermore an effect that increases as users become more experienced in using the web. Finding labels that are both accurate and map onto user expectation is thus crucial to creating effective web navigation.
Related to the concept of ’scent’ and confidence is the notion of ’satisficing’ – the observable behaviour whereby visitors will tend to choose the first option they encounter that seems to satisfy their needs, rather than evaluating an entire page for the optimal solution.
Complementing the notion of ’scent’ is the idea of ‘information shape’ – which is to say, information genre and the set of formal characteristics that define this. Because genres are such precisely in relation to other genres, overall rules are impossible to formulate: satisfying the conditions of information shape is really a question of working with established conventions. That being said, useful work has been done in the area of identifying evolving digital genres – with Kalbach citing the work of Elaine Toms and that of Andrew Dillon and Misha Vaughn in particular.
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