On Apr 28, 2007, at 5:29 PM, Bill Mason wrote:
...
I can tell you my experience at the company I'm currently working for,
as to why they mandate using "_blank" in some circumstances.
(Disclaimer: I don't endorse the policy, I just have to live with it.)
...
1) Fear that the user will follow some link away from our pages, and
never return to complete the form. (I think this comes from sales
and/or marketing personnel.)
A common solution to that is to minimize links on the form, even to the
point of removing most global navigation. Sometimes form-specific links
are necessary (e.g. "By submitting this form you agree to our __terms
of service__ and __privacy policy__"), but links like those should use
named targets rather than _blank (because if someone opens one of those
links twice it's a mistake, they don't actually want two copies open).
2) Complaints from users who would follow the surrounding links
elsewhere and then lose their way back to the application form. (This
would primarily occur when they started the application form -- which
is typically multiple pages -- and go off following some other link to
find some piece of information about the application process, finally
losing their way to how they got into the form in the first place.)
In both cases, I have no idea why the back button isn't enough for
everyone involved, or how people got lost in spite of having a back
button.
...
Because the Back button is a horribly awkward interface for navigating,
especially for getting back to pages you visited a few minutes ago. (In
some browsers the Back button has a visible associated menu, but it's
hard to open -- and it relies on page <title>s, which readers probably
didn't notice when first scanning those pages, again because of poor
browser design.)
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
