Just Click Your [Logo] Three Times…

If  only getting to a site’s homepage was as simple as clicking your heels.

Typically I spend the days clicking away on my computer in the Beaconfire offices high above Arlington.  However, this past week my colleague Mark and I wrapped up a series of usability testing sessions for one of our esteemed clients.  It was a fascinating couple days.  During the testing sessions, we forayed into a health system  and found ourselves meeting with people who spend their days saving lives.  It was humbling, certainly, and also quite informative.  We discovered what happens in the Apheresis lab.  We repeatedly heard that you would not go to a cardiologist to have coronary artery bypass surgery; you’d see a cardiac surgeon for that.  Good things to know.

And, we discovered that some of what we techies have come to consider usability standards don’t seem to actually have cemented themselves as standards yet.  One of the most significant discoveries is that the use of a logo in the upper-left corner as the primary avenue to return to a site’s homepage is not yet a universally known convention. 

In the process of our low-fidelity prototype testing, we started each task on the prototype’s homepage.  Once the users completed the first task – helping Cousin Louisa find where she could have an MRI and what she needed to know to prepare for the procedure – users were told to return to the homepage to start the next task.  How did users get back home?

1. They clicked the “Back” arrow on the browser.
2. They clicked the “HOME” icon on the browser. 
3. They asked us how to get back home.

What did users not do?  They did not click on the logo to return to the homepage.  Nor did they seem to notice the “HOME” link in the breadcrumb trail at the top of each page.

Okay, okay, okay.  I’m exaggerating.  Of the 15 people we tested with, two people clicked the logo in the upper-left hand corner to return to the homepage.  And, of the same 15, two others found the breadcrumbs and clicked those.  Eleven people used the browser “Back” arrow to get to the homepage after each of the six tasks we presented.  Many of them mentioned that they expected to see “a box that says Home at the top” of the primary navigation items.  Others suggested that it could live somewhere at the top of the page above the search.  Either way, they wanted an explicit navigation item that said HOME outside of the body content.

Our testing sessions provided a lot of rich data that will inform our work on this project and others going forward.  While we may think getting people home is just a matter of clicking the logo (once, not three times in this case) it seems that, for now, we still need to provide an explicit nav item that will get folks there.