Standards, BEST PRACTICE, accessibility, usability, XML
The logo should not link to the homepage
It is a nice convention that a company logo also has a secondary role as a link back to the homepage. But a convention should be challenged if most users have not heard about it or don't use it, or if the concept is wrong.
- Convention and myth
- Too many links
- Back button and Backspace
- Full history and power browsing
- Link element and the rel attribute
- Alternatives to the homepage
- The logo as a test of souls
- One link to the homepage
- Footnotes
1. Convention and myth
In 2001 Carolyn Snyder published a great article about usability, Seven tricks that Web users don't know [1] . I quote the first trick:
Logos that link to the home page
"A friend of mine was surprised to learn that a company logo is usually a link to the home page. What's more surprising is that he's run a successful software development business for 20 years -- even experienced geeks don't know all the tricks! And by the way, nowhere is it written that this is a design standard -- it's just a useful convention that many sites have adopted."
"When I first noticed that the majority of users (two-thirds in one study -- see the sidebar) didn't click logo links, I wasn't sure whether they didn't know about them or knew but simply didn't use them. To find out, I started asking users whether they knew that the logo was a link to the home page. (I'm always careful to ask this kind of question at the end of a usability test, otherwise I could change the very behavior I'm trying to observe.) Sure enough, most of the non-clickers confirmed that they didn't know this trick."
"Suggestion: It's fine to use logo links, but incorporate the word "Home," or possibly ".com" (see Figure 1). It sounds painfully obvious, but it really does help -- people know what "Home" means and they do click on logo links when this word is visible. Plus, this approach could teach users to start clicking logos on other sites."
If it is true that most users have not heard about the logo as link to the homepage, it is fair to ask if we should spend more time trying to enlighten them. Why not break the convention?
2. Too many links
Most websites, I would say more than 95 percent, has the homepage as an item in the main menu, or as part of the breadcrumb menu, or both. Why have a second or third link back to the homepage on every page except the homepage? Why not keep it simple stupid? To reduce complexity is the most important guideline of usability.
Redundant links to the homepage are a nightmare for many users. Think of the blind and their screen readers. They have to listen to all those links read aloud over and over again page after page. But redundant links are also bad for ordinary keyboard users. Let us take www.usablenet.com as example.
UsableNet has probably listened to Carolyn Snyder. We have a text link beneath the logo. Unfortunately both the logo (the globe) and the text link have an anchor of their own, giving us two competing links to the same thing. Now watch out. The text "UsableNet" is also a separate link (second area of image map) to the homepage giving us three links to the same thing in an area the size of a post stamp.
Tooltips don't work for ordinary keyboard users but only for the mouse and screenreaders. The keyboard user must look carefully at the three URL's if shown in the browser. Most users have only a vaque understanding og URLs. Many keyboard users will probably follow two or all three links to find out if they are going to different places.
3. Back button and Backspace
An inch above the company logo, we have the back button of the browser. The history is actually a very nice list of the pages visited. Why should the user hit the back button, or Backspace of the keyboard, or use Alt-LeftArrow and Alt-RightArrow in some browsers? The history is normally cached and works in a split second. Using links to the homepage are just as fast if the web page is cached in the browser.
But many users don't cach webpages in the browser, they prefer to reload a page to be sure to get the newest information at some websites. It is simply not practical to turn caching on and off as needed. If pages are not cached, they take seconds at best to reload using a link and could easily take 10 seconds or more on a slow line or with modem. But the history is almost always cached.
4. Full history and power browsing
Today most users have screen resolutions of 1024x768 or higher giving us more much needed space. High resolution makes more intelligent power browsing possible. The history is no longer just the back button and the short list of visited pages in the browser menu but we have now space to turn the full history on in its own panel or window. In IE and Mozilla the full history can be turned on and off with Ctrl+H, in Opera you can use F4.
Clicking logos, just like hitting the back button in an mechanical manner, belong to the first decade of primitive surfing just looking for something to happen. Such navigation can still be useful or even a shortcut, but in the coming years users no longer want to waste most of their time using the net, they want efficient, more direct, predictable, reliable and systematic navigation.
The logo as a link back to the home page is simply not very useful most of the time. It is most often redundant navigation adding unnecessary complexity to a webpage. Clicking logos is often a mediocre way of navigating a website if the history exists and you have just visited the homepage, or if an ordinary explicit link is also available to the homepage. You never know what you get clicking a logo fast.
5. Link element and the rel attribute
The HTML link element and the rel attribute is normally used to include an external style sheet, but browsers like Mozilla and Opera are already supporting the link element for other specific relationships.
The idea is that if the web page author provides a list of relationships in the head section of the webpage, it could give users uniform and consistent navigation to at least some of the more common pages of a website. If link and rel are used for that purpose, a website menu is turned on in the browser.
Below I show an example of such a website menu in Opera and Mozilla. In Opera "Home" takes you to the homepage (big surprise), and in Mozilla "Top" takes you to the homepage.
Website menu in Opera
Website menu in Mozilla
It is my guess that accessibility guidelines makers love such a standard menu, the one in Opera seems the better implementation. One day it could become mandatory for at least governmental websites to include such navigation. I am more likely to think that such a standard menu is a disservice. It takes up valuable space, and why add a redundant menu and one more link back to the homepage?
One day every web page author must decide if webdesign should look like a silly competition: How many links back to the homepage is it possible to jam into a webpage and the browser and still call the navigation easy to understand, simple, usable and best practice?
6. Alternatives to the homepage
If the logo as link to the homepage is just a silly convention, counter-productive and a disservice to the user, we should look at alternatives.
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Let the logo just be a logo. This is probably the best solution. I don't expect many web designers to follow the advice, since it takes stomach to break a convention.
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Why not let the logo be a link to a surprise? Let the link open as a little note in the upper left corner (use absolute positioning), with the text:
Since there are many other and better ways to reach our homepage, and so few users click the logo anyway, we have decided that clicking our logo should be a happy surprise for the chosen few knowing about it.
Our logo leads to:
- A quote of the day, a saying or a riddle (no jokes please), we like at our company.
- Announcements of new products a day before official announcements.
- A picture and short presentation of a new employee.
- Something important that we would like all to remember, a birthday, an anniversary.
- Clicking our logo could also mean an automatic donation of hundred dollars to charity or to a good purpose in our local community.
7. The logo as a test of souls
Think of the logo as a test of webpage authors and users:
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If the logo on the homepage is also a link to the homepage, the webpage author has probably no understanding of usability and you can expect the worst from the website.
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If the logo is only a link to the homepage at other pages you should still be suspicious since the webpage author seems to just follow conventions not having an independent mind.
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If clicking the logo leads to a surprise, then judge the website by the quality of the surprise: is the surprise worth the trouble of breaking a convention?
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If the user clicks the logo on a regular basis, beware! The user is new to the net with little experience. The user has probably a very poor understanding of how to navigate a website in an efficient way.
Don't get offended, the tests are just an exercise in provocative writing. I too click logos from time to time, at least once a month.
8. One link to the homepage
We know now that the main problem is not the logo, but too many links to one and the same thing. One link to the homepage is great, two can be acceptable in some situations, and more than two is a strong indication of bad information architecture. If a webpage don't have a traditional menu or a breadcrumb menu, the logo could be an obvious choice for a link to the homepage.
If the logo is the primary or only link to the homepage, we should follow the advice of Carolyn Snyder and include a proper link text, e.g. "Home", in the anchor right beside or under the logo. Both logo and link text should be inside the same pair of anchor-tags to give us just one link.
If a link text is necessary to make the logo work as a link to the homepage for all users in all situations, we could just as well stick to the text link alone and place the logo outside the anchor tags. It is no big deal for users of the mouse, but keyboard users prefer to tab clean text links. For keyboard users image links are most often a drag making navigation more difficult.
9. Footnotes
- [1]
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IBM has by mistake deleted Seven tricks that Web users don't know, Carolyn Snyder, 2001. Hundreds of linking websites have now broken links! Carolyn has mailed me a pdf copy of the webpage.
Open or save pdf file, 7us-tricks.pdf, 271 KB, 6 pages:
Seven tricks that Web users don't know
Copyright © Jesper Tverskov, 2004
Last updated 2006-08-30