You don’t have to keep going back to get home

By David Bomphrey

It is common place now for sites NOT to put a “home” link in the main navigation on a site and instead rely on the convention that the site logo is a link to home; Amazon are amongst them.

Yet I am reminded almost every time we do testing that this convention is NOT widely known to even to regular internet users let alone relative newbies.

Instead we see time and again users pressing the back button many, many times to return to the home page.

I have been advocating for a number of years that some assistance is given to users when sites choose to adopt this approach. My preferred solution would always be for a proper home link but sometimes that is not always practical. Second best would be to combine the word “home” or “homepage” with the logo. Again, for many very reasonable, practical and brand protection reasons this is also not always possible. My final recourse is to add the word “home” or “homepage” as part of a rollover state.

Sadly I can’t take the credit for this but Amazon have also had the same idea and more to the point have implemented it! If what is arguably one of the biggest brands online can do it then so can everybody else.