Usability: Home Button on 5 page site?

[Evoir]

I wonder if you have any insight on this in terms of usability...

I constantly run into clients who want a home button on their 5 page website. I always have the logo be the home button, and I think it is absurd to have a "home" button on a 5 page site.

client writes: "we need a Return to Home Page on each page . Lots of people are not that intuitive."

I get this ALL the time. Any suggestions to combating this?

I tell them to look at even more complex sites like amazon, buy.com and even google. No "Home" button. Instead, the logo is present in the upper left corner and links back to the home page. I think it makes the sites look much more "homemade" and amateur and would prefer to not put it in there. Usually, I end up doing it because the client insists.

I used to edit video for people, and found that clients always wanted me to do these stupid effects that made their video look cheaper, only because they really didn't understand the medium. You see it all the time on local TV ads. I don't want the sites I produce to be like those local TV ads with cheesey effects and HOME buttons.

I mean, the whole site is 5 pages!

[Erica C.]

I tend to deal with people who are less experienced with the web; I doubt that they'd know the convention that you click on the logo to go to the home page. To make the site usable for the largest number of people, I think a home button would make sense. And if the site only has 5 pages, it's not like it'd weigh down the navigation. :wink:

I've never thought of a home button as being less professional. Besides, FQ has them. :smile:

Just my 2 cents.

Erica

[Tom E.]

For those who are unaware of the logo->home convention (or even the Back button), I sometimes put a text-only menu at the bottom of each page, near the copyright (like the "Forum Home - Contact Us - Guidelines..." menu at the bottom of this forum). The home link is there if someone needs it, but it doesn't detract from your main links on the top or side. It also helps if visitors have Javascript disabled, but you use it for popup menus or other scripted navigation.

My favorite non-technical user experience was with an interactive laserdisc (the old 12" analog ones) training system I worked on. The instructions contained the phrase "Move the mouse up to ...", so the user picked the mouse up and raised it in the air!

[Evoir]

I tend to deal with people who are less experienced with the web; I doubt that they'd know the convention that you click on the logo to go to the home page.

This is exactly what less experienced people FEEL. But, I don't think it is true. I mean, they use Google, right? Do they use amazon.com? I think that if you ASK these people that is what they would say.... but that doesn't mean that the user cannot figure it out. It's like saying that you need a button that says "hang up your phone here" rather than just setting the phone down.

Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine, and it just came up again with a newish client. Someone told him that it should have a home button, and now he's telling me that his site is not intuitive....

[Erica C.]

I don't think it is like that. The shape of the phone suggests a correct way to hang it up. What on a web site suggests that the correct way to find the home page is to click on the logo? In my (albeit limited) experience, there's a gap between what technical folks consider to be intuitive and what non-technical folks find intuitive.

Erica

[Evoir]

What part of a phone tells you you have to dial a 1 for local long distance, and a 1 plus an area code for real long distance? And what about on cell phone, no 1? Or why is there no label for a busy signal? There are conventions for a reason....

Anyway, we can agree to disagree, like I said it is a pet peeve of mine. And I'd really rather not have HOME buttons on sites I build. I build sites to be intuitive and easy to navigate, and that is my specialty, and I think the people (clients) fear that people won't know how to get to the home page. And then they show the site to a friend who says, yeah, there should be a "home" button, because they once saw that on a site that their cousin built or something.

A well designed website should not need a home button, IMHO!

What about amazon and google and other big name sites? Why don't they have home buttons?

The logo is the home button on most major websites.

[Evoir]

I really don't mean to be so obnoxious. I guess I won't get what I want (Which is to eradicate all HOME buttons!) so, I am venting. No amount of reason will help me at this point. :rasberry:

[PaulKroll]

A well designed web site has to have a home button, in my completely not humble opinion. Google doesn't have a home button because home isn't particularly special for it: you can search from any following search result page. Amazon has tabs at the top that are, fairly effectively, their home page links. If you're making a site with actual content, not a giant shopping cart or a search engine, then your site has nothing to do with theirs anyhow.

CNN has a home button. Slate has a home link in its breadcrumbs. So does BoingBoing.net. Is there really a major site without a home link? I know that many of the people at work, who do indeed use the web all the time, haven't got any clue about the logo convention. (So like everyone else, we have both the graphic and a named link.)

Oh, and by the way, if you're on Google, and you click one of the Google-related links, like say "Advertising Solutions" or "Privacy Policy" then they >DO< have a named "Home" link on the page. (They don't for "About Google"... but anywhere you link from on that page, does have a Home link, and the only other place you can go on the page is.. Back. )

Not liking the Home link is like not liking the common nav structure with top and left nav bars. It's the way things have worked out, and if you wanna fight the earth, good luck with that. :)

[georgeek]

I wonder if you have any insight on this in terms of usability...

I constantly run into clients who want a home button on their 5 page website. I always have the logo be the home button, and I think it is absurd to have a "home" button on a 5 page site.

client writes: "we need a Return to Home Page on each page . Lots of people are not that intuitive."

I get this ALL the time. Any suggestions to combating this?A couple of observations.

Precedence in site design should be in the following order; search engines, users and then the client.

Just to expand on that a little, there is very little in designing a site for the search engines that will impact or conflict with usability or the client. There are some situations I have come across, for example where the client has requested a particular CMS which is hopeless as far as search engines are concerned. In these rare cases it is not difficult to prove to the client (with examples) that their choice is not a good one.

Secondly every usability study I have been involved in (100s!) has convinced me that neither I or the client have an intuitive clue on how users will actually use a website's navigation. However there are some common denominators and I can tell you from experience that if you don't have a home button clearly visible in your main navigation a large number of users will waste time looking for it before possibly eventually clicking the logo. The majority of users who waste time looking for a home button when there isn't one will actually click the back button in their browser until they go off site back to the search results and select the next result down. If you ask them why they did this the answer is invariably because the site was difficult to navigate.

So in your case I would side with the client although he has probably never witnessed a usability study in his life.

- George

[Evoir]

hmmmmm. Interesting. I'm being swayed a bit. (a bit)

[Erica C.]

I thought this was such an interesting topic that I started to conduct a thoroughly unscientific survey.

I sent an email to bunch of people asking the following:

"If you were visiting a web site and you wanted to get to the home page but couldn't find a home button, what would you do?"

So far, the responses have been:

Quit (2)

Use the back button (3)

Strip the extra information after the .com in the address bar. (1)

Oh. Two of the people who'd make the effort to do something said depending on circumstances, they'd just quit before trying anything else.

Erica (not trying to push anyone, honest. just curious)

[Evoir]

ah. nevermind. I'm just a crank pot about home buttons.

[Erica C.]

Not at all. You could well be on the cutting edge and in the future people will know to use the logo to go home the way they know how to hang up a phone! :yeah:

Erica

[hobbes]

Erica - the question is slightly faulty in that a logo could be considered a "home button." A more targeted questions from a usability standpoint would have been: "If you were visiting a web site and you wanted to get to the home page but did not see a menu or link named 'Home', what would you do or try?"

[Erica C.]

Erica - the question is slightly faulty in that a logo could be considered a "home button."
Oh. Excellent point. Maybe you should continue the unscientific study. :smile:

I did get 12 possible strategies from the 14 folks who responded to my question. One did mention clicking on the logo so she at least saw it as different from clicking on a home button.

[Bob]

How about presenting the idea, with visuals, of having the Logo as the "Home" button but making sure it is coded with Alt and Title tags for pop up tool tips in most browsers.

While it would not be as evident as a "Home" link it would allow someone moving around a site to come across the tool tip and for frequent visitors they would soon get the idea :dunno:

-Bob

[Evoir]

Yeah, I thought it was kind of a leading question. You could ask it another way, and get a totally different answer. How about: If you went to a website and clicked on the company logo, what would you expect to happen? Leading in another way. Really, the person has to be sitting in front of a website and if the site is designed well, they WILL intuitively click on the logo.

Who ever thought of calling it a HOME page, anyway? It's not my home!

[Armand]

Who ever thought of calling it a HOME page, anyway? It's not my home!

I've always used 'Main' (as in main page) on my site... for like 9+ years. Now I'm wondering if it's better to use the wording 'Home' vs. 'Main'. (Logo also has long been linked to main page of course). So which do you think is better?

[PaulKroll]

Home. For english-speaking users, I'd bet all the money in my wallet, which is considerably more than (checks) three dollars... OK, I'd bet the life of this person (points to Wassercrats) that folks are looking for "Home" and totally missing or confused by "Main."

But if you do an actual usability study on your site, you can check this as one of the items, and get other benefits to boot, so consider doing one. :)

[Mandi]

I hear you, I think it's redundant too. Consider at least a tiny text footer that has the home link (and all of the other extensive FOUR pages, LOL!) because it will make it compliant for people who must use text browsing (ie, visually disabled, and a few Luddites.) An image-only link of any sort fails on that point, not just for home.

[Mandi]

Oh, and I would say I see about 75% "home" and 25% "main" - to me, they are interchangeable.

I do wish there was standard language for "Find a Store" though - I bet that is why I go to big business sites 85% of the time!! Maybe that's unique to someone like me who moves all the darn time, though.

[Wassercrats]

Home/homepage and main would be equally understood if you use the form "Homepage: http://www.domain.com" which is what I've used for years. People would see it's the base address. It's also best if people may be viewing a snapshot or printout of your page.

HTML 4 for Dummies says:Even though this document is a home page, it contains a link to itself in the URL line. All other local pages in your Web must also contain a link in the footer to a full home-page URL...if a user saves your page as an HTML file and later wants to know its location, he can find it on the bottom of the page, both visible and as a link. Don't you wish everyone used this technique?

The snapshot in the book shows the footer as "URL: http://www.domain.com"

So I declare the question moot and my safety guaranteed.

[Armand]

Guess I'll probably switch to using 'home' then.

I do wish there was standard language for "Find a Store" though

Most of the big stores I hit online tend to have and use 'Store Locator' or similar. Problem is usually on sites that are small to medium size businesses they don't have that, which does suck.

[Matt]

If a client specifically requests a home button, I would put one (regardless of my own preferences). On a five page site, I bet the average user is more likely to click the back button than on the logo. So, I am not convinced that the logo should equate to the home button, but I do agree that clicking the logo should take the visitor to the home page (for those visitors that are accustomed to this convention). My pet peeve regarding buttons is more along the lines of a client wanting something like 10 primary navigation buttons/ menu items.

-Matt