In the testing phase for a recent release, I received an email from the client's third party development team stating that there was no way to return to the homepage once they clicked on any link off of it. They were having to reload the URL. No way home? How could I have missed that?!
I didn't know what to think. I had run through all of the changes myself, paying particular attention to the navigation just the day before. I immediately loaded the site and checked it out. It was fine, the corporate logo was successfully linking to the homepage on every page I tested. What could the developer have seen that I was missing... JavaScript error? Browser-specific problems?
Then it occurred to me...
In reworking the utility navigation, we had removed the explicit "Home" link. We opted instead to have the corporate logo serve as the link to the home page. We were adding a "Subscribe to Company" link and the area was already pretty full, so we decided to simplify things. It was a convention that we have employed countless times and seen employed countless others. The Utility navigation, for those who use different terms, is what we call a group of global links reserved for user actions (rather than content) grouped together in the header -- things like "Login/Logout", "Subscribe", "Contact Us".
I re-read the developer's email and suspected that I had found the problem. The developer was looking for the "Home" link, not finding it, and reporting it as a bug. I looked down at the signature in the email and saw that I was dealing with a Senior Systems Analyst.
So, what do you do when a senior systems analyst cannot find their way home. It is easy enough to add it back, but is it necessary to clutter up that area with a redundant link?
Now while this entry means no disrespect to any senior systems analysts, it does bring up some interesting questions for me.
For a brief moment, I thought "if a senior system analyst cannot find his way home then what of the poor, non-savvy masses?"
Then I started to think, and not for the first time, that people in the industry are NOT representative of internet users. We often suffer from myopia or acute literalism.
In pondering this, I thought back to a usability study that I did for Cisco Systems a few years back. As you may well imagine, there were a number of very savvy technical experts involved in that testing. Anecdotally, in thinking back, it was the more technical savvy users that met with the least success (and most frustration) completing the tasks. Again, anecdotally and from memory (so not to be trusted as any kind of truth) it seemed as though those technically savvy folks fell into the same trap. They decided what the thing that they were looking for should be called and if they did not find "that" then they were convinced that it wasn't there to find.
I had come to think that this was true of all users - they have preconceptions of what they are looking for and if they don't see it, then they get frustrated and assume it is not there. In some cases, if you are lucky, there may be a couple of viable options for terminology, but not always.
In contrast, I recently walked my part-time accountant through a web application over the phone. She is not what I would call web savvy. She seemed very open and approached the application without any real preconceptions (albeit with a little bit of trepidation). What I found, though, is that she skimmed, read and reacted to what was there not what she thought should be there.
Now, obviously, there are countless variables to this equation - the third-party developer happened also to be offshore, likely India. They may have been involved with the previous site that did have the link and the logo wasn't clickable. They may have been tired at having to hit a tight deadline. Who knows? But I do wonder if those of us in the industry have less faith in the sites that we visit. We know that there will be issues, errors and problems in the sites we visit, all sites have them. We may not "world" with sites in the same way that people NOT in the industry do. Perhaps, we are a little trigger-happy with using the word "bug"...
So, what do you do when a Senior Systems Analyst cannot find their way home? Does it mean that the non-savvy users will be SOL? I am not so sure.
Submitted by Scott (not verified) on May 14, 2007 - 3:32pm.
For the sake of keeping an interface clean, I've always wished this was more standardized than it seems to be.
It seems that most of the sites that I've worked on have planned for this convention in the early iterations of design comps. However, either by client request or some other reason, it becomes the secondary means of finding the homepage by the time the site goes live.
Do you think adding a "home" tooltip/title to the logo would reinforce the idea enough to stand alone or is the problem in finding the link in the first place?
Submitted by Denise on May 15, 2007 - 10:03am.
I couldn't agree more about wanting this to be more standardized. I went back to Nielsen to find what he had to say on the subject. In "Designing Web Usability," he states:
The important point is to make the home page into a landmark that is accessible in one click from any interior pages on the site, no matter how people entered. On all interior pages, the logo should be clickable and linked to the home page. Unfortunately, not all users understand the use of the logo as a link to the home page, and it will take a while until this convention is fully established. So for the next few years, it will also be necessary to have an explicit link named "home" on every page.
That goes right to the experience you describe -- wanting to drop the explicit link, but adding it in the end.
Now, it is probably important to note that that was written in 1999 - 8 years ago. It might be interesting to look at the same 50 homepages that Nielsen examined in "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed" (2002) and see how many of those sites kept, dropped or added an explicit "Home" link.
In my initial searches, I haven't found anything written after 2002 about this particular convention. I would love to see/hear about any usability testing that talks about this point to see if there is evidence that this convention has become more established.
I, too, wondered about a tool tip. It would be interesting to test that out.
Good to hear from you.
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