Usability Question

[vsplaine]

Hello all,

I am a senior web designer/information architect for a publishing
company in NY

A colleague of mine asked me to pass along a question to all of you
regarding asking a user to "make this-site.com your homepage"

What are your feelings about this? Do you feel that it is a good
practice or a bad practice?

To give you some background, my colleague is an editor, and would
prefer not to add this line to his web site. However the powers that
be (with no information or support) are asking him to add this feature
to the web site. I am looking for data and/or research that might view
this as a bad practice.

Thanks in advance for your response.

 

[enrique]

I'm sorry, I have no quantitative data for you.

But I can offer my opinion, based on my work experiences. I'm going to
assume the desire to make the site the end user's home page is because
the site is designed to be a portal page, with entry points to various
items of interest to the end user. If this is an incorrect assumption
you can stop reading here.

The thing about portal sites is that end users don't like to be
restricted in how they use the Internet. Trying to funnel them through
a particular entry point -- say for exposure to certain advertising --
is contrary to how end users like to interact with web sites. Whether
or not end users choose to make a portal site their home page depends
on how frequently they will visit it, compared to how frequently the
other web sites are accessed.

 

[humbads]

A colleague of mine asked me to pass along a question to all of you
regarding asking a user to "make this-site.com your homepage"

What are your feelings about this? Do you feel that it is a good

practice or a bad practice?

My English teacher used to ask, does it add, subtract, or do nothing?
Maybe look for research that looks at how many words people read on web
pages of your type. My opinion is that it is extremely limited, and
therefore, you want to have only the most important text on your page.
Personally, I consider words like "make this-site your homepage" the
mark of an amatuer. If people really find your site worthwhile,
they'll bookmark it of their own accord. (I'm assuming it is a public
website.)

 

[kaeli]

A colleague of mine asked me to pass along a question to all of you
regarding asking a user to "make this-site.com your homepage"

What are your feelings about this? Do you feel that it is a good
practice or a bad practice?

I think it's useless, personally. Who the heck doesn't know how to make your
site their homepage if they want to? It's just more text cluttering up a
page. It also makes it look a bit amaturish, IMO.
Nothing says 'I m teh cool3st!!!!11 w00t!!' like that sort of thing. LOL

And if it's more than text (i.e. an alert/confirm) it's more than useless,
it's annoying as hell. Sites that use a javascript confirm or prompt to ask
me if I want to make the page my home page are sites I don't visit again.

--
--
~kaeli~
"When dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity
ceases" -- Robert Anton Wilson
http://www.ipwebdesign.net/wildAtHeart
http://www.ipwebdesign.net/kaelisSpace

 

[Richard Cornford]

vsplaine wrote:

A colleague of mine asked me to pass along a question to
all of you regarding asking a user to "make this-site.com
your homepage"

What are your feelings about this? Do you feel that it
is a good practice or a bad practice?

What may be unambiguously regarded as bad practice is presenting a user
with a UI component that claims to be a means of achieving something but
fails to achieve that when activated.

Not all browsers (by a long way) provide a scriptable means of making
the current page into the user's home page so good practice would imply
a need to determine whether the current browser environment facilitates
the action of assigning a home page prior to even displaying the option
to the user. This would be particularly true in the case of assigning a
home page in an attempt to encourage repeat visits to a site as all
browsers provide that facility to the user anyway, but if they use a
"convenient" alternative UI component on the page they won't necessarily
be aware of its failure until they go to their home page, at which point
the page in question may be lost to them (or look much less appealing
due to its failure to fulfil its promises).

So the first question is do you have access to a script author who knows
how to determine with certainty whether a particular browser is capable
of fulfilling a "make this site your home page" action. If not the rest
of the question is academic as the result is likely to do as much harm
as good.

To give you some background, my colleague is an editor,
and would prefer not to add this line to his web site.
However the powers that be (with no information or support)
are asking him to add this feature to the web site. I am
looking for data and/or research that might view this as a
bad practice.

Ask them to provide an example of where they think this has been
achieved, in advance, and then demonstrate that example failing to
deliver (and discuss the outcome of such failures). This is easy because
those with no 'information or support' are inevitably using default
installations of Windows IE, which is probably the one environment where
such a script might 'work'.

Richard.