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February 27, 2006
Within-a-page links
Jakob Nielsen advises against within-a-page links (aka anchor tags). He says the only time it's okay is if you are linking down in a table of contents, FAQ, or alphabetized list and that you warn users that's what the links do.
We've all had the anchor-tag page from heck that drives us nuts, and yes--use them with caution. But my own take is that when you're using the tags in the contexts he "approves" as okay, I really don't think you need to warn your users. It's a common enough practice with those examples that I think users will be fine with it. Besides, no one actually reads the stuff we write on our sites anyway--they just click, click, click til they find what they need.
February 27, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
Personally, when I'm looking at a long page, I like links at the top to get me to places on that page and love anchor links for that reason. they are often good at giving me an outline of a page.
Also, as regards to pop up links, which are discussed in the webpage you link to, in many situations, users would rather have them rather than "lose their place" on the page that they wre seeing. It happens all the time at my library. For example, when using a citation manager, users seem to prefer a pop up so they can do their citation work in another space.
It looks like the criticisms are based on users' expectations from a few years ago.
Lastly, I do find it difficult when I have to work under these kind of over-broad, sometimes outdated and out of context rules for the web. "Users'expectations" are varied and are evolving all the time.
Posted by: Isabel Espinal | February28, 2006
