“Then watch them try to go somewhere, move the mouse over a link, click it, and wait for something to happen. Only it was a link to the page they were already on. THEN look at their face. See how long they wait. Ask them how they feel when they realize they were waiting for nothing to happen.”
What is slightly amusing here is that THIS user is going to click on your differently styled non href’ed link also (depends if this hypothetial user is savvy enough to understand the pointer to finger cursor change…a whole other argument)…and then sit there confusedly waiting to go somewhere and not…so I fail to see the relavance in your hypothetical test.
In both cases the user will learn (hopefully), that clicking on that link goes no where. So it’s a moot point whether it’s a live link or not. Either way the user learns it doesn’t do anything…
But yes, it should be styled differently…and as long as you are doing that it is just as easy to take the href out..so you win :-)
but in the end it doesn’t really matter that much b/c one global navigation will win out and the link will stay href’ed and unstyled…why? B/c it’s easier and I have to get home for dinner and play with my kid ;-)
I agree Johan that the user would not automatically assume disstrust should if you link to the page your on via the main navigation. But one thing I think instills trust is if your nav bar is in the same place thru the whole site and not just one way on the front page and differnt on the subs
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Michael Roth
Your article makes sense BUT, I being someone who works on the Web for a living knows the “logo” is usually a link back to the homepage/index, but looking at this site, (alistapart.com), show me where the “home” button appears on this page. If I were a casual user and landed upon this page, how would I navigate to the home page? I guess this site fits the category of “mistrust” also.
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Gerry Quach
I have to say that despite the fact it sounds counter-intuitive, I prefer it when a tab link is not deactivated even though I’m already on the page it links to. It feels like there’s a cognitive disconnect if I hover or click on the tab and nothing happens.
When it comes to breadcrumbs however, I always disable the link on the item at the very end of the breadcrumb trail (i.e. the current page), as it just seems wrong to have the link active.
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John Bertucci
Here are a few things I just feel are missing from the article that do not favor the implementation of removing ‘self links’.
While it confuses some people to have them, it can confuse others by remove them.
It can cause feelings of discomfort.
Given time / cost restrictions, it is not an important ‘feature’ on a website and does not deserve priority over other features when building a website.
Most examples given against self-links are problems of poor design and not the actual self-link.
A programmatic implementation is not terribly difficult to code, but can add to the complexity of a site making updates/debugging more difficult.
A programmatic implementation will increase the page creation time of the site as every link on ever page would have to check against the requested page URL. Links can often be very long and a page can have quite a few links on them. Each link would require a string comparison. Certain logic might be needed include the query string as product pages are often dynamically built which could make comparison slightly longer and more complex.
Statically implementing such an idea would require the maintenance of multiple different navigation systems on different pages. It should go without saying how bad an idea this is.
It actually might be a design choice to allow self links for “˜tabbing’. A business’ site might often have users who “˜multi-tab’. It’s much easier right clicking and choosing “˜new tab’ from the menu than opening a new tab and coping and pasting the address into the new tab address bar and submitting it. Without self-links, this is impossible.
It’s necessary. AJAX style sites (such as Google Email and Google Analytics) not only break the back button, but they can break the refresh button as well. Refreshing a page might only be possible (without extra clicks) by having a self-link. Think clicking your “˜inbox’ when you’re in your “˜inbox’ to refresh your mail. Also, AJAX style sites can actually update a page faster with self-link refreshes than full-page (refresh button) refreshes, depending on how the site was programmed.
If it were really a serious usability issue, it wouldn’t be done on today’s biggest sites.
Correct me if I am wrong about this, but there are more than just visual needs of users. What happens to users of screen readers? Does their navigation options change? Do screen readers see the same navigation options or do they now exclude any choice of the self-linked page? Do users of screen readers prefer having or not having self-links? Do screen readers already exclude self-links? Just because a navigation doesn’t visually change (dramatically), doesn’t mean the mark-up isn’t going to semantically be missed.
This discussion reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon. The marketing department asks the engineers for something completely impossible because it would be “˜cool’, resulting in the engineer stabbing himself with his tools.
Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done. What’s good on paper is not always good (or practical) in practice. As designers, we strive for the prefect stylish and usable site. As programmers, we are trying to create applications that are simple, fast, extensible, feature packed and logical. As business people, we strive to out-do the competition and make more money. These 3 things conflict with each other at some point or other. You cannot have the most usable site and have it be the fastest site possible while being cheap and quick to produce. Removing self-links is the designers Nirvana, makes the programmer groan. There for it’s up to the businessman to break the tie, which means to remove self links have to have a ROI given the sites target market.
Which is probably why you do not see it on implemented on pretty much all the big name sites and only on more of the academic pages. There’s relatively no ROI for implementing such a feature, even if its considered a usability benefit by knowledgeable and professional people such as Mr. Nielson and Mr. Powazek.
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Charles Belov
1) My reaction to pages that link to themselves is “Why did you waste my time?” One option might be to, in addition to making the non-link look different, add a title attribute of “You are here.” My site avoids self-linking.
2) I’ve also had the frustration, as mentioned above, of a link that seems to offer more information actually turning out to be a self-link.
3) Dynamic breadcrumbs replace the functionality of the browser’s Go-back-more-than-one-page button, and thus strike me as overkill. They also appear to require cookies to work.
4) Hierarchical breadcrumbs would seem to be good for where am I, although not for “How did I get here” if an alternate path was taken. My site plans to implement such breadcrumbs.
‘Tabbing’ is defenetly not impossible without self-links. That’s more of a user-agent problem. For example Opera allows you to simply duplicate a tab. ‘Impossible’ is a bit harsh.
‘Tabbing’ is defenetly not impossible without self-links. That’s more of a user-agent problem. For example Opera allows you to simply duplicate a tab. ‘Impossible’ is a bit harsh.
The reason for that is because the title is a permalink. Users are accustomed to right-clicking on it to grab the URL.
Chris Botman responded:
But what was wrong with using the address bar? Isn’t there a design rule floating around about not reproducing browser functionality?
Because maybe the address bar contains a link that isn’t a link to the page but to a specific part of the page, like the comments section.
I for one use it quite regularly to open the same page in a new tab (often in a situation where I have to qoute or keep the original text as easy reference – standard quoting options are often very limited and small textareas don’t help either).
I do this all the time. It’s much easier for me to click the link using the thumb wheel to open in a new tab than to copy the link from the address bar, open a new tab and paste the URL in the address bar of the new tab.
In the 1994 a study came out (sorry I can’t remember where or the name) that looked at application navigation. The major thing that I remember from that study is that when users look for navigation items they first look for a specific location, then item text and finally an image.
Because of that study, I always leave the navigation alone other than styling the current location differently. Just like on a tabbed form, you know which tab you’re on because it looks different from the other tabs. I’m on the home page, the home link is styled so that the user can see that it is the current page. (Be sure to use more than color as some are color blind.) Location is the most important thing here, so I don’t want to remove the navigation item. I can see the logic of making the current page not linkable while still leaving it in the site navigation.
I’ve found that there are times users find it is easier to use the site navigation rather than the refresh button. After all, the site navigation is on the page, not the browser isn’t it? There are cases like the Inbox in email or when a page has content that dynamically changes like a stock quote on a portal page to style the current page navigation link differently and to leave the item linkable.
Dynamic breadcrumbs replace the functionality of the browser’s Go-back-more-than-one-page button, and thus strike me as overkill. They also appear to require cookies to work
I don’t have a problem with the fact that they require cookies. They provide a potentially useful feature that augments the standard navigation, rather than replaces it – so someone who doesn’t have cookies isn’t going to be served a substandard page – they just won’t have this “bonus” feature.
And while it does, to some extent, duplicate the back feature of browsers, it does more than that – you can be going backwards and forwards through pages such that a page you visited doesn’t appear anywhere on your back/forwards list. Yes, there is also the history feature that most browsers include, but that isn’t always easy to use.
Thanks for a very interesting article. I must admit, as I was reading through it and flicking back to my site, I realised I was doing a number of things wrong.
Good article. A little obvious, but it definitely needs to be said.
You make a point that navigation should show the user where they’ve been, but you don’t show it in your tabbed example of Awesomeness.org. How would you treat that aspect of correct global navigation?
I believe in self-linking, and I too have 11 years of experience. Who knows if that really means anything though.
In a breadcrumb trail (dynamic or static), I wouldn’t allow the last item (the current page) to be a link. I also wouldn’t make the title of a page a link. If the content was dynamic, I’d add a link labelled ‘Permalink’ (or better ‘Permanent Link’ or ‘Bookmark this page’). If the content was dynamic, and reloading was useful, I’d add a link or button labelled ‘Reload’ or ‘Refresh’.
However, in the main navigation, I firmly believe in self-linking as main navigarion is often in the form of heirarchial menus. In there, every option should always be a link. Every other menu behaves like that on my computer. Just because I just copied a piece of text, the ‘Copy’ option in the edit menu isn’t disabled until I select something else. When I have a new document open, I can still create (another) new document.
In a menu, every option should be available. Elsewhere, don’t self-link without it being obvious why it’s a self-link.
When users “learn” through trial and error that the section ‘tab’ does not self-link, they would likely assume that the same behaviour applies to subsequent section pages. In that case users might think they have to click to another section in order to return to the top page in the current section.
While creating three modes for the section ‘tab’ is a good idea, I don’t think many typical users would notice a subtle variation between the selected state and the linkable-selected — Having to learn a new third mode might be more confusing than having a page self-link.
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Richard Curtis
An observation – clicking the Home link on the Flickr homepage changes the greeting between “Hi”, “Allo” and “Namaste” – English, French and ? (German?).
I think webmasters link to their current page because they think it will improve they’re on-page SEO. I can understand when a website uses a universal navigation bar with a “home” link to the index page, but other than that, I agree that they are annoying.
P.S. I’m so glad I found this site! I am an aspiring designer and it’s exactly what I was looking for!
Already I read user experience article… now this one also good… because I know the importance of the navigation in designer point of view. But this is good for user point of view. So this will help for me.
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frank grimes
If the intent to not allow links to the current is to identify the current position within the site, okay. The tab example works fine.
If a site is more complex, as suggested by the author, life is more complicated. A page navigated to from a drop-down menu is a different matter.
A site with a series of dropdown menus—either single- or multi-level—don’t benefit from the logic of page identification. Content, for me, always dictates the structure. If I can identify on the page the location within the site with breadcrumbs or page title (in the url or browser bar or within the page text), I will.
It’s my hope the viewer of my site is keen enough to understand where he or she is or, more importantly, how to find what he or she is looking for without visual cues in the navigation, but I also understand this is not always the case.
As I develop sites for my customers, I offer my advice and my insistence on standards, but ultimately, they pay me so they have the final say. Too often this results in navigation replete with redundant links, inconsistent arrangement or any such horrors.
My thought is if there is an active link to the page I’m on, so be it. It’s more important to me to have a consistency to the navigation. It’s been my experience that users find this more helpful.
94 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleAndrew White
“Then watch them try to go somewhere, move the mouse over a link, click it, and wait for something to happen. Only it was a link to the page they were already on. THEN look at their face. See how long they wait. Ask them how they feel when they realize they were waiting for nothing to happen.”
What is slightly amusing here is that THIS user is going to click on your differently styled non href’ed link also (depends if this hypothetial user is savvy enough to understand the pointer to finger cursor change…a whole other argument)…and then sit there confusedly waiting to go somewhere and not…so I fail to see the relavance in your hypothetical test.
In both cases the user will learn (hopefully), that clicking on that link goes no where. So it’s a moot point whether it’s a live link or not. Either way the user learns it doesn’t do anything…
But yes, it should be styled differently…and as long as you are doing that it is just as easy to take the href out..so you win :-)
but in the end it doesn’t really matter that much b/c one global navigation will win out and the link will stay href’ed and unstyled…why? B/c it’s easier and I have to get home for dinner and play with my kid ;-)
Johan De Silva
I don’t think the user would automatically associate distrusts if you link to the page your on via the main navigation.
Britney Simpson
I agree Johan that the user would not automatically assume disstrust should if you link to the page your on via the main navigation. But one thing I think instills trust is if your nav bar is in the same place thru the whole site and not just one way on the front page and differnt on the subs
Michael Roth
Your article makes sense BUT, I being someone who works on the Web for a living knows the “logo” is usually a link back to the homepage/index, but looking at this site, (alistapart.com), show me where the “home” button appears on this page. If I were a casual user and landed upon this page, how would I navigate to the home page? I guess this site fits the category of “mistrust” also.
Gerry Quach
I have to say that despite the fact it sounds counter-intuitive, I prefer it when a tab link is not deactivated even though I’m already on the page it links to. It feels like there’s a cognitive disconnect if I hover or click on the tab and nothing happens.
When it comes to breadcrumbs however, I always disable the link on the item at the very end of the breadcrumb trail (i.e. the current page), as it just seems wrong to have the link active.
John Bertucci
Here are a few things I just feel are missing from the article that do not favor the implementation of removing ‘self links’.
Correct me if I am wrong about this, but there are more than just visual needs of users. What happens to users of screen readers? Does their navigation options change? Do screen readers see the same navigation options or do they now exclude any choice of the self-linked page? Do users of screen readers prefer having or not having self-links? Do screen readers already exclude self-links? Just because a navigation doesn’t visually change (dramatically), doesn’t mean the mark-up isn’t going to semantically be missed.
This discussion reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon. The marketing department asks the engineers for something completely impossible because it would be “˜cool’, resulting in the engineer stabbing himself with his tools.
Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done. What’s good on paper is not always good (or practical) in practice. As designers, we strive for the prefect stylish and usable site. As programmers, we are trying to create applications that are simple, fast, extensible, feature packed and logical. As business people, we strive to out-do the competition and make more money. These 3 things conflict with each other at some point or other. You cannot have the most usable site and have it be the fastest site possible while being cheap and quick to produce. Removing self-links is the designers Nirvana, makes the programmer groan. There for it’s up to the businessman to break the tie, which means to remove self links have to have a ROI given the sites target market.
Which is probably why you do not see it on implemented on pretty much all the big name sites and only on more of the academic pages. There’s relatively no ROI for implementing such a feature, even if its considered a usability benefit by knowledgeable and professional people such as Mr. Nielson and Mr. Powazek.
Cheers,
John
Charles Belov
1) My reaction to pages that link to themselves is “Why did you waste my time?” One option might be to, in addition to making the non-link look different, add a title attribute of “You are here.” My site avoids self-linking.
2) I’ve also had the frustration, as mentioned above, of a link that seems to offer more information actually turning out to be a self-link.
3) Dynamic breadcrumbs replace the functionality of the browser’s Go-back-more-than-one-page button, and thus strike me as overkill. They also appear to require cookies to work.
4) Hierarchical breadcrumbs would seem to be good for where am I, although not for “How did I get here” if an alternate path was taken. My site plans to implement such breadcrumbs.
Rene Saarsoo
To comment point #8 in post of John Bertucci:
‘Tabbing’ is defenetly not impossible without self-links. That’s more of a user-agent problem. For example Opera allows you to simply duplicate a tab. ‘Impossible’ is a bit harsh.
Rene Saarsoo
To comment point #8 in post of John Bertucci:
‘Tabbing’ is defenetly not impossible without self-links. That’s more of a user-agent problem. For example Opera allows you to simply duplicate a tab. ‘Impossible’ is a bit harsh.
Tanny O'Haley
Chris Hester said:
Chris Botman responded:
Because maybe the address bar contains a link that isn’t a link to the page but to a specific part of the page, like the comments section.
I do this all the time. It’s much easier for me to click the link using the thumb wheel to open in a new tab than to copy the link from the address bar, open a new tab and paste the URL in the address bar of the new tab.
In the 1994 a study came out (sorry I can’t remember where or the name) that looked at application navigation. The major thing that I remember from that study is that when users look for navigation items they first look for a specific location, then item text and finally an image.
Because of that study, I always leave the navigation alone other than styling the current location differently. Just like on a tabbed form, you know which tab you’re on because it looks different from the other tabs. I’m on the home page, the home link is styled so that the user can see that it is the current page. (Be sure to use more than color as some are color blind.) Location is the most important thing here, so I don’t want to remove the navigation item. I can see the logic of making the current page not linkable while still leaving it in the site navigation.
I’ve found that there are times users find it is easier to use the site navigation rather than the refresh button. After all, the site navigation is on the page, not the browser isn’t it? There are cases like the Inbox in email or when a page has content that dynamically changes like a stock quote on a portal page to style the current page navigation link differently and to leave the item linkable.
Stephen Down
I don’t have a problem with the fact that they require cookies. They provide a potentially useful feature that augments the standard navigation, rather than replaces it – so someone who doesn’t have cookies isn’t going to be served a substandard page – they just won’t have this “bonus” feature.
And while it does, to some extent, duplicate the back feature of browsers, it does more than that – you can be going backwards and forwards through pages such that a page you visited doesn’t appear anywhere on your back/forwards list. Yes, there is also the history feature that most browsers include, but that isn’t always easy to use.
Andrew Chilton
Thanks for a very interesting article. I must admit, as I was reading through it and flicking back to my site, I realised I was doing a number of things wrong.
My site will be updated fairly shortly!
Jason Spector
Good article. A little obvious, but it definitely needs to be said.
You make a point that navigation should show the user where they’ve been, but you don’t show it in your tabbed example of Awesomeness.org. How would you treat that aspect of correct global navigation?
Thanks.
Ricky Christie
I think if you can cancel out the confusion of an anchor link if you set the text of it into something like:
Scroll down to footer
Rick Measham
I believe in self-linking, and I too have 11 years of experience. Who knows if that really means anything though.
In a breadcrumb trail (dynamic or static), I wouldn’t allow the last item (the current page) to be a link. I also wouldn’t make the title of a page a link. If the content was dynamic, I’d add a link labelled ‘Permalink’ (or better ‘Permanent Link’ or ‘Bookmark this page’). If the content was dynamic, and reloading was useful, I’d add a link or button labelled ‘Reload’ or ‘Refresh’.
However, in the main navigation, I firmly believe in self-linking as main navigarion is often in the form of heirarchial menus. In there, every option should always be a link. Every other menu behaves like that on my computer. Just because I just copied a piece of text, the ‘Copy’ option in the edit menu isn’t disabled until I select something else. When I have a new document open, I can still create (another) new document.
In a menu, every option should be available. Elsewhere, don’t self-link without it being obvious why it’s a self-link.
Jay Rex
When users “learn” through trial and error that the section ‘tab’ does not self-link, they would likely assume that the same behaviour applies to subsequent section pages. In that case users might think they have to click to another section in order to return to the top page in the current section.
While creating three modes for the section ‘tab’ is a good idea, I don’t think many typical users would notice a subtle variation between the selected state and the linkable-selected — Having to learn a new third mode might be more confusing than having a page self-link.
Brad Rench
My apologies if this method was already covered elsewhere in this discussion … .
The way I achieved not having a link to the current page was to place a label inside each list item of my navigation menu:
<div id=“nav”>
<ul>
<li id=“someLink”>SomeText<label>SomeText</label></li>
…other <li>‘s …
</ul>
My global.css:
#nav li label
{
display:none;
}
On each individual page, I added a style something like:
#nav li#someLink a
{
display:none !important;
}
#nav li#someLink label
{
display:block !important;
}
The !important may not be necessary in all cases. It seemed to be necessary for me since I’m using ASP.NET with Themes.
One problem I can see with this method is that it’s adding <label>‘s to each page that aren’t used (except for the <label> for the current page).
Thoughts?
Brad
Richard Curtis
An observation – clicking the Home link on the Flickr homepage changes the greeting between “Hi”, “Allo” and “Namaste” – English, French and ? (German?).
Brad Rench
I believe “Namaste” is Hindi/Sanskrit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namaste
Brad Rench
I believe “Namaste” is Hindi/Sanskrit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namaste
Thierry Koblentz
I wrote a script awhile ago to take care of this:
“linktext”:http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/navigation_links_and_current_location.asp
Jason McElwaine
I think webmasters link to their current page because they think it will improve they’re on-page SEO. I can understand when a website uses a universal navigation bar with a “home” link to the index page, but other than that, I agree that they are annoying.
P.S. I’m so glad I found this site! I am an aspiring designer and it’s exactly what I was looking for!
krishnamoorthy manickam
Already I read user experience article… now this one also good… because I know the importance of the navigation in designer point of view. But this is good for user point of view. So this will help for me.
Thanks…
frank grimes
If the intent to not allow links to the current is to identify the current position within the site, okay. The tab example works fine.
If a site is more complex, as suggested by the author, life is more complicated. A page navigated to from a drop-down menu is a different matter.
A site with a series of dropdown menus—either single- or multi-level—don’t benefit from the logic of page identification. Content, for me, always dictates the structure. If I can identify on the page the location within the site with breadcrumbs or page title (in the url or browser bar or within the page text), I will.
It’s my hope the viewer of my site is keen enough to understand where he or she is or, more importantly, how to find what he or she is looking for without visual cues in the navigation, but I also understand this is not always the case.
As I develop sites for my customers, I offer my advice and my insistence on standards, but ultimately, they pay me so they have the final say. Too often this results in navigation replete with redundant links, inconsistent arrangement or any such horrors.
My thought is if there is an active link to the page I’m on, so be it. It’s more important to me to have a consistency to the navigation. It’s been my experience that users find this more helpful.