Feb
21
2006
Jakob Nielsen, Anchor Links, and why Design is Important

Jakob Nielsen’s latest rant is against anchor links. Anchor links existed before image tags. In fact, they were in the HTML spec before HTML specs had version numbers (notably this 1992 W3C HTML specification).

Jakob’s argument: Users are used to going to a different page when they click something. For a click to have any other effect would hopelessly confuse the user.

This is pretty sad. Check your calendar, Jakob. The year is 2006. This argument may have held back in the days of brochureware web sites, but we’re already in the postmodern phase of the web — web sites are no longer just a collection of static pages. Web “applications” are the order of the day. Let’s list my “mental model” of what clicking a link might do, based on the context of said link. By context, I mean clever design used to bestow affordances upon the link (something Nielsen obviously knows very little about).

Clicking a link may:

  1. Bring me to another page
  2. Bring me to another part of the current page (oh no!)
  3. Initiate a download
  4. Open a dialog box (DHTML or otherwise)
  5. Expand a section of the page
  6. Modify a page’s stylesheet
  7. Re-center a map (Google Maps)
  8. Subscribe to an RSS feed
  9. Play a video

I’m sure I could think of more. The point is that if you care to help the web evolve so that every site doesn’t look and work like, well, Jakob Nielsen’s web site, you must use design to create intuitive usability. Flickr introduced many new user interface concepts to people (such as simply clicking on a title to change it) — without hopelessly confusing and alienating users. How did they do it? Design. Design and usability go hand-in-hand. Without design there is no innovation. Without innovation, there is useit.com ;)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 12:04 pm and is filed under The User Experience, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Jakob Nielsen, Anchor Links, and why Design is Important”

  • […] There’s nothing new about anchor links. They’ve been around almost as long as hyperlinks themselves.As Jeff Chausse points out in his recent post , anchor links have been around longer than image tags (since at least 1992). In the hotch potch that has been web design over the years, anchor links are probably one of the interaction design elements that have been applied with most consistency over the years. There are strong conventions around the use of anchor links. The mental models is pretty darn simple too. […]

    anti-Alertbox: Jakob says ‘Anchor links are evil’. Discuss. at disambiguity 2/28/06 @ 1:34 am

  • support 3/2/06 @ 9:19 am

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