VIA Interaction

Monday, August 29, 2005

Open a new window?

We usually counsel against opening new browser windows when a visitor clicks on a hyperlink.

The motivation for opening the new window is usually to keep people on your site. However, it ends up being an annoyance and effectively disables one of the most used navigation devices on the Web - the browser's Back button. (That's because the new window has no history to go back to.)

However, we have noticed something over the years in our own usability testing: People are much more facile when it comes to manipulating windows. We can undoubtedly credit their years of knocking down pop-up advertisements for that.

Now, Jakob Nielsen (of all people!) is arguing that there is a case for opening new windows when the target page requires loading an application like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word.

People tend to treat those pages like they are within applications (and the way the browsers' embed the application controls for them certainly suggests that they are), and close the browser when they are done with them.

Writes Nielsen,

"In user testing, we often observe the following behavior: When people are finished using PDF files, Word memos, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, and similar documents, they click the window's close box instead of the Back button. This gets them out of the document all right, but not back to the Web page from whence they started.

"Blowing away browser windows is particularly bad on intranets, where users often have to log in or jump through other hoops to access document repositories."

That sounds right to me, and something we will look for in our testing.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/29/2005 12:17:00 PM

---