Outsight Interactive - Usability - Comments

Great observations, Jon.

Denise — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:32:55 -0400

Great observations, Jon.

Luke W shows those kinds of treatment options for primary and secondary actions at the bottom of the following: Web Application Form Design

One thing I'd be aware of is

Jon Reil — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:59:35 -0400

One thing I'd be aware of is how the order of these buttons translates to users that have to tab through your interface. One would think that you would want the action item to be the first item chosen as it would more than likely be their preferred choice.

One other question that comes to mind is: Should these both be portrayed visually as buttons? Or should the primary action be a button and the secondary action be a link... so [OK] and then cancel ?

Just a couple more interesting things to think about in these somewhat never-ending debates.

I couldn't agree more about

Denise — Tue, 15 May 2007 11:03:40 -0400

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.

For the sake of keeping an

Scott — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:32:48 -0400

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?