Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Click

Summary: Link labels and navigation options must clearly describe the content users will find. Users follow scents of relevance. Navigation becomes intuitive. Content discoverable. Experience enhanced.

Information scent determines users’ ability to predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website. It’s a crucial element of web usability that influences how easily users can navigate and find the information they seek. The idea of hypertext (the basic interaction paradigm of the web) is that I am here and need to go there, following the link connecting the two pages. Information scent is the degree to which the information provided at the origin “smells” like the destination for the link.

Users can’t see the actual destination content until after clicking the link, but life is too short to click all the links on the Internet. That’s why users rely on the information scent emitted by links and navigation options before clicking. People don’t know for a fact what they’ll find, but the information scent establishes their expectations. Disappoint users too many times by poor information scent (or worse, misleading information scent), and they’ll stop using your website.

Good information scent happens when link labels and other navigational cues accurately represent the content they lead to. (They emit the scent of the destination.) For example, an e-commerce site with clear category labels like “Men’s Clothing,” “Women’s Accessories,” and “Home Décor” provides strong information scent, allowing users to choose their path confidently.

Now, brace yourself for the stench of bad information scent. Imagine stumbling upon a corporate website with a menu option cryptically labeled “Synergistic Paradigms.” What in the name of all things clickable does that mean? You'd have better luck deciphering ancient hieroglyphics than figuring out where that link leads.

For web designers, understanding and implementing good information scent is crucial. It involves creating clear, descriptive labels and organizing content in a logical, intuitive manner. By doing so, designers can enhance user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase the likelihood of users finding the information they need efficiently. If the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product. That’s why information scent is important.

Information scent was named in analogy with the behavior of wild animals in nature. A predator, such as a fox, will smell the various paths through the forest and pursue the one with the strongest scent of prey. Similarly, users will click links that emit a strong scent of useful information to be had at the other end of the link. (Midjourney)

Information scent is the most important concept from the broader information foraging theory, developed by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card at Xerox PARC. (Warning: this link leads to a long academic paper in PDF format — if you can stomach it, it’s worth reading for a deep understanding of user behavior in interactive information systems.)

Here are two comic strips about information scent, made with Story Illustrator GPT. The first is more metaphorical, whereas the second is more literal. Which approach do you prefer? Let me know in the comments.

Feel free to copy or reuse this infographic, if you link to the URL of this article.

Feel free to copy or reuse this infographic, if you link to the URL of this article.

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 41 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (27,077 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

·       Follow Jakob on LinkedIn.

·       Subscribe to Jakob’s newsletter to get the full text of new articles emailed to you as soon as they are published.

·       Read: article about Jakob Nielsen’s career in UX

·       Watch: Jakob Nielsen’s 41 years in UX (8 min. video)