In this month’s Central Texas DITA User Group meeting, we had an excellent presentation about linking using DITA maps and relationship tables by Scott Stark from IBM. He’s located in Austin and supports about 150 writers in California. His presentation is available for download from the Files section (membership required) of the ctdug Yahoo Group. When the video of the presentation is posted, I’ll be sure to link to that as well. In the Files section he also includes examples of the files he demonstrated with sibling or family links, sequential links (automating previous and next topic links), required links, target only or source only, and showed the power of linking that can be done with DITA automatically.
For even more information about the power of linking with relationship tables, Scott highly recommends Linking DITA Topics Through Relationship Tables by Kylene Bruski of Comtech Services, Inc.
What caught my attention this particular meeting is the de-emphasis on inline links, or links within the paragraph context as the text is read. This blog entry has many examples of inline links in the first two paragraphs. It’s not really topic-like. Scott stated that there are basically just three types of links in DITA – inline, citation, and related links. That is a precise summary. I believe that he most powerful portion of DITA and DITA maps are the management of related links. But I also believe that inline links have value as well, even in a topic-based system like DITA.
Inline links are what we are commonly finding as we continue to analyze our existing content. We have relied on cross-references in our FrameMaker documentation and online help to shorten tasks by having the first step link to another task, by collecting lists of cross-references to suggest what to do next, and for glossary definitions as popups within the text. We’re still trying to determine the best course of action for migrating those links.
While deliverables that contain lots of cross-references are not topic-oriented, I am starting to wonder if inline links are going to be the stage for usability battles to be waged because of sites like Wikipedia that heavily rely on inline linking for context. Since the user can probably safely assume that inline links in a help system go only to places within the information deliverable, the inline link offers valuable context to the reader and doesn’t “remove” the reader from the user assistance system. Also, placing related links at the bottom of a page where the reader has to scroll to in order to view might be another usability problem.
So, does DITA have it wrong when it comes to usability of links?
On Don Day’s suggestion, I did some searching for studies that would back up the topic-oriented link collection method that DITA advocates. According to this usability study titled Where Should You Put the Links? Comparing Embedded and Framed/Non-Framed Links, related links embedded on the left hand side of a screen layout were “searched faster (though not significantly), was perceived as being easier to navigate and to find information than the other link conditions.” I also found some excellent blog posts by SEO experts when trying to find usability studies to back the DITA preference for collecting links in one location. While SEO is more about optimizing pages for search than the actual readability of the page, there are excellent arguments back and forth for when you should use inline links and when they are actually a distraction. I first read “Inline Linking Bad for Usability” and I enjoyed his examples – one written with all inline links, and one written with all related links at the bottom. I would wonder if blogs with inline links and Wikipedia will “train” readers that inline links are helpful to click but perhaps only after they read the entire entry, our readers will be more able to perform their tasks despite inline links.
Another blog post by an SEO is on “The Value of Embedded Links” and one of his arguments is “So, regardless of where links are, chances may be that some visitors will miss links. Ideally, the way around that is to make sure that links within content can be easily seen.” I see this as a “scattershot” method, however, rather than analyzing your content and audience to determine the best placement of links, you would just place them everywhere you could, if you follow this argument to a logical conclusion. So perhaps DITA is doing the right thing by forcing their opinion of usability of user assistance systems by encouraging us to collect links in one location. My concerns after reading some usability studies on the topic are that perhaps 1) the placement of the related links could be improved and 2) as readers are trained by other information deliverables such as wikis and blogs that inline links can be clicked after reading the entire entry, DITA will be considered old school for its lack of inline links.
Perhaps we should change the DITA Open Toolkit transforms so that related links are in a on the side of the page instead of clumped together at the bottom of the page. I think that overall, DITA and topic-based writing has been a little unforgiving with the use of inline links. Since I can’t find usability studies that back up the claim that grouping related links together is better for users, and especially with sites like Wikipedia succeeding with inline links, I think that both types need to be given equal importance and flexibility for applying in the right way for the right audience and deliverable. What do you think?