Quick update on my search for data about opening links in new tabs or windows. • _Everyone_ has an opinion• No one has shared any data• I reached out to a web analytics expert who has been in the field over 20 years who replied, ”I have no idea and hav...
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Jason Grigsbyreplied to Katie Sylor-Miller on last edited by
@ksylor @beep it’s been funny seeing how many responses I’ve received that assert not only that they prefer opening links in new tabs, but that everyone is used to it these days and that it should be the default behavior.
As someone who prefers same tab and consciously choosing when I want a new tab, I’ve been biting my tongue. I don’t want to debate preferences because my preference as a developer doesn’t matter.
Related: I think I need that extension
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Give the user the choice. This is the way.
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@beep @ksylor Your pencil budget must be out of control. I hope you recycle the broken ones.
This may be the best use case I’ve heard for mechanical pencil. Like giving a metal bat to Bo Jackson.*
* I don’t follow baseball so my reference is both dated and likely wrong, but I seem to remember him breaking bats
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@[email protected] @[email protected] yep, we follow the same UX on our product. If it's an anchor it opens in-page no matter what. The end user's browser settings and behaviour get to choose what to do. Ctrl/middle-click to open a new window, etc.
The only constant is that no matter what behaviour you choose, someone will complain about it and say you're doing it wrong!
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Chris Coyierreplied to Katie Sylor-Miller on last edited by
@ksylor @beep @grigs It would be fascinating to know what was tested.
- Conversion rate?
- Time on site?
- Follow up survey?
- Something else?I mostly think it would be funny if a company switched all their links to open in a new tab and found their Time on Site metric went up and decided that was Automatically Good.
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Katie Sylor-Millerreplied to Chris Coyier on last edited by
@chriscoyier @beep @grigs lol there’s only one metric that matters in e-commerce and it isn’t time on site!
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Katie Sylor-Millerreplied to Katie Sylor-Miller on last edited by
@chriscoyier @beep @grigs but your point is solid nonetheless!
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@beep @ksylor put your pencils somewhere safe and read this comment https://cloudfour.com/thinks/arguments-for-opening-links-in-a-new-tab-or-window/#comment-15876
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Dave Gillhespy 🐯replied to Jason Grigsby on last edited by
@grigs if there’s no evidence to support the practice, there’s also no evidence say it’s bad either, right? For me it’s one of those things that I sometimes want and sometimes don’t.
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Jason Grigsbyreplied to Dave Gillhespy 🐯 on last edited by
@yodasw16 there is a lot of usability and accessibility studies that point out problems. But UX and accessibility often loses out to perceptions that if you open in a new tab, that you can “keep people on your site.”
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The way I see it, if an anchor to an external page causes my visitor to leave and not come back, then they already really had one foot out the door. There may be other studies that back up the claim that it increases time-on-site, but as to whether it actually increases conversions... maybe we should look at those studies.
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@grigs You may already have read this, but I found the accessibility framing around link behavior (prefer opening in the same window by default, not a new window/tab) to be persuasive: https://adrianroselli.com/2020/02/link-targets-and-3-2-5.html
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@markllobrera Oh yes. The accessibility and usability arguments are compelling. They are why I’ve argued against the practice for two decades.
But I often lose that argument because site owners want to “keep people on their site.”
After all this time, I finally stopped and wondered, “How well does it actually work? What am I arguing against? Is it a 15% increase in time on site? 5% increase in revenue? Or a more miniscule .2% increase in time on site that might be a meaningless stat anyways?”
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@markllobrera Aside from people who have a preference for the behavior or have a use case that warrants opening a link in a new window (see: https://css-tricks.com/use-target_blank/), the site owners who insist on opening links in new tabs or windows believe it provides some business value to them by “capturing” visitors, “making it easy for people to return,“ or otherwise increasing the chances someone will return after clicking on a link.
I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to find data that supports that belief.
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Jason Grigsbyreplied to Katie Sylor-Miller on last edited by
@ksylor @chriscoyier @beep It just occurred to me that the ecommerce use case is different than the context of the poll that sparked my inquiry.
Lynne asked “To all my content creators, content marketers, marketers, and editors out there. What do you do with links on your site?”
And clarified in the comments, that she was distinguishing between outbound and internal links.
In the tests you all did @ksylor, was it internal links? I’m imagining from category or search results to product pages.
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If a site opened internal links in search results in a new tab purely because you lose context when you hit back (think infinite scroll shenanigans; same can apply to search results), then that's a really crappy band-aid to fix an underlying problem.
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Katie Sylor-Millerreplied to Jason Grigsby on last edited by
@grigs @chriscoyier @beep yes it was internal links.
