11 Last action in navigation

3 Were i have been !

There are any other way, beyond the :visited?!
I thing any another way of doing this will confuse user.

posted at 01:54 pm on August 8, 2006 by Nuno Gaspar

12 Do as I say, not as I do

Never, ever link to the page you’re on

You said it most emphatically, in capitals even.

Yet, at the top of the page, what do we see? A link to the page we are already on…

posted at 02:18 pm on August 8, 2006 by Stephen Down

13 Linking to the current page

Are links that go to the page you’re on really such a bad thing? Let’s see what happens when the user clicks them. The page reloads, and they realise they are where they were before. Big deal! Nothing terrible has happened.

If you’re not at the top of the page when you click the link, it might not be obvious that the same page has loaded, because the screen content has changed.

OK so you might find it obvious, as a skilled web user, but a lot of people won’t. Think of all the people out there who double-click on hyperlinks and type complete URLs into Google – these are people who really struggle to interact effectively with a computer. And some of them will be confused by clicking on a link and being taken back to where they were already.

posted at 02:23 pm on August 8, 2006 by Stephen Down

14 Where I have been

There are any other way, beyond the :visited?! I thing any another way of doing this will confuse user.

Teachernet tracks pages you have visited during that session and lists them (with breadcrumb trail) at the bottom of the page.

I’m not convinced how necessary this is, but it is certainly a way to let visitors quickly jump back to pages they have already looked at, even if there would otherwise be no direct navigation to that page.

posted at 02:27 pm on August 8, 2006 by Stephen Down

15 Flickr Home page

Just look at that link to the home page on the home page.

It may be just me, but I can’t find a single link on the home page pointing direct to http://(www.)flickr.com. Perhaps they took your advice and removed it.

posted at 03:33 pm on August 8, 2006 by Jeroen Schot

16 Linking to the current page

In some cases leaving links to the current page is reasonable, if the decision is made to give a measure of consistency to the navigation. Having the navigation look/react consistently should certainly be a consideration.

Personally, I like the links to always exist, but being involved in web design I’m probably not representative of the majority of users. Perhaps the best solution is to leave the href in, but give the user (as in your examples) a clear indication of their location within the site structure.

posted at 03:41 pm on August 8, 2006 by Max Wheeler

17 Fact or opinion?

I am wondering if this is based on the opinion of the author or is this based on actual usability research? Paging Dr. Nielsen…

posted at 04:07 pm on August 8, 2006 by Christian Ready

18 Makes sense... but is it really necessary?

First, good read. I always enjoy ALA articles by fellow web professionals. I agree with the founding princile of having the ‘past’,‘present’ and ‘future’ available or answerable on every page. However, is the whole ‘don’t link to yourself’ point necessary?

My reasoning is simple…

Users are smart enough to know that if you click the ‘/news/’ section button, it brings them to the “News” index page. While, I think it’s a good idea to have the link change colors or visiably different, is it truely necessary to also slap the users hand and tell them “No!” if they want to click the link again?

Also, we’re only talking about one page, the main/home page of a section. To write more complex code, to remove a link for only main/home pages of sections in the navigation bar just seems to be a lot of overkill, expecially when I do not believe there is any adverse effects to the user experiance, allowing them to click on the link again.

In fact, I would argue the opposite, if you remove the link and the user is moving their mouse across the navigation ‘buttons’ and suddenly their little hand doesn’t appear over a ‘button’ that just worked, it might cause some feelings of discomfort in the fact that it’s not doing what it just did seconds ago.

Then again, it’s important to change the link, visually, so if you’ve code that part, you should have the logic to just remove the link as well, if a designer feels it is more relavent.

However, what I feel was missed with the point of ‘do not link to yourself’ is not the same link, linking to yourself, but different links linking to the same page. How annoying is it to click a link ‘Product Catalog’ on one page and then click another link in the same navigation called ‘Easy Product Selector’ to find yourself at the ‘Product Catalog’ page? In terms of global navigation, there should never be more than one link that goes to a single page.

Cheers,
John

posted at 04:23 pm on August 8, 2006 by John Bertucci

19 Untitled

Most have one global navigation template, to make site-wide changes quick and easy. Building in a lot of if/then statements to change the links per page takes some extra time. But it’s so worth it. Simply changing a global navigation item to be plain old text when you’re on that page means that it will look different (visual recognition of your present place) and will avoid the click-to-go-to-where-you-already-are bad experience.

To achieve the effect of removing a link without actually having to rewrite CMS code, you can just style the link to make it appear as if it’s plain text. Assuming your page has id’s assigned to the appropriate elements, you could style the link something like this:

body#home li#homepage a{cursor:default;color:black;text-decoration:none;}

posted at 04:43 pm on August 8, 2006 by Dan Wilkinson

20 RE: Linking to Current Page

If you’re not at the top of the page when you click the link, it might not be obvious that the same page has loaded, because the screen content has changed.

OK so you might find it obvious, as a skilled web user, but a lot of people won’t … some of them will be confused by clicking on a link and being taken back to where they were already.

There’s two different topics here.

1. Good Design

1. Being taken back to the same page by the same link on said page.

First, there are some users out there, that no matter what, you cannot design a page for them without making it look something you’ll find on MySpace. Second, a properly designed site would not have a link to itself that is at the botto of a page, that would just be a little pointless. Though, I can think of links that might be in the footer, such as site maps and privacy policies. That might be a situation where this would occur. However, these are not normally considered ‘primary’ content a user comes to a site to find.

As I argued above, even users who are uncontrolably bad at understanding website functions have enough sense to know that if one ‘element’ reacts to a particular action, that doing that particular action on the same element should cause the same result. Thus, users would not find it unexpected or confusing to end up on the same page by clicking the same link. In fact, that’s what they want to happen and taking that away, and particularly on just one page for one item, can be both over kill on programming and a possible user experiance fault.

I would be interested in some study research regarding this idea though.

Cheers,
John

posted at 04:44 pm on August 8, 2006 by John Bertucci