labeling conundrum

Hi,

An interesting issue has cropped up for me and I'm hoping
to get some
quick finger-to-the-wind feedback. We have been working on a
new
"global navigation bar" or "page
header" for our web-based
product--aka the top 2 inches of the screen where the
primary
navigation links live and are consistently presented
throughout the
site. We have been calling this project the Global
Navigation Bar
Refresh internally. I didn't think I was going to need to
have a
name/label for it externally, so I haven't given it much
thought.
However, it turns out that we have PRINT documentation (and
it $ound$
like there's a lot of it) that has been referring to that
area of the
page as the "toolbar" for years (aka; since the
product was actual
shrink wrapped software & where toolbar probably was the
precisely
right terminology).  Our marketing folks are creating a
flash demo and
in the process of trying to decide what to call this they
stumbled
onto the documentation issue. The documentation people feel
very
strongly that the flash demo needs to call this part of the
page the
"toolbar" to correspond to the documentation.

I'm very reluctant to call this a toolbar as I think that
"toolbar" is
widely recognized as a widget or collection of functions
that can be
added/removed to an application and that enable some kind of
functionality, whereas the navigation bar or menu at the top
of the
screen allows you to move throughout the site. I think the
dominance
of Google & the Google toolbar at this moment in time
further
exacerbates the situation. (Additionally, our competitor has
just
launched a toolbar of their own...)
However, doing some searching and poking around it's clear
that web
designers refer to the collection of links that lets you
move around
the site as navigation bars or navigation menus, but I'm
not really
sure about the average user. I know that in usability tests
I very
rarely hear a user say "navigation"
anything--they usually just point,
call them links or menus. I don't want to make a big stink
and have
the company spend a lot of money printing new documentation
if this is
a non-important issue--i.e., does it really matter if our
documentation calls the top of the screen a toolbar? It's
hard for me
to imagine a scenario in which the users would experience
mass
confusion (and we'd just be talking about users who
actually use
documentation), so it doesn't seem like a big danger.

But the semantically precise part of me is tied up in knots.

What say you?

Samantha

--
Samantha Bailey | samanthabaileysorts.com | http://baileysorts.com

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labeling conundrum

Thread: labeling conundrum