Home Link
Design Pattern

Join the early bird Black Friday list

Black Friday is just around the corner, and we’re excited to offer early access to our best deals of the year at shop.learningloop.io. If you’re looking to elevate your brainstorming sessions and streamline your team’s workflow, our printed card decks are here to help.

Want to get in before everyone else?
Join our Black Friday Early Bird list to be the first to know when discounts go live! We’re launching the sale early this year, so you can grab your deck and start putting it to use before 2025 even begins.

Join the list

Alternate titles: Go Back to a Safe Place.

Problem summary

The user needs to go back to a safe start location of the site.

Example

Usage

  • Use when users frequently enter the website through a page other than the home page. The user needs to be able to easily navigate to the starting point or front page of the website.

Solution

  • Create a link to the starting point or front page of the website on the site’s logo on every single page on the website.
  • If the site does not have a logo, then create a link to the front page of the website with the text ‘Home’.
  • The link and/or linked images should always be in the same location on all pages.
  • If the website has more than one home, then be sure to make the distinction in linking between the root home and the local home.

Rationale

It has become a standard in webdesign, that the site’s logo is always linked to a safe start location for the user. Normally, this is the front page of the site, but it could also be the front page of a section in the site, or some other safe start location for the user.

This article has been commented 3 times.

User Interface Design Patterns

Getting input
Navigation
Dealing with data
Social
Miscellaneous
Onboarding

Persuasive Design Patterns

Cognition
Game mechanics
Perception and memory
Feedback
Social

3 comments

  • koji on Jun 18, 2009

    I don’t know if this a local problem, but i applied some usability tests on logo link to home page. Only hardusers are able to predict the link. Regular users still trying to search a “home” link with text. :( Not so great for a clean design…

  • David on Jul 14, 2010

    My experience with users confirms koji’s comment. An important % of users do not consider naturally the logo as the home page. Definitively i would recommend always a specific home page link next to the main navigation items

  • Sydney Smith on Apr 06, 2011

    It is amazing that users that define themselves as saavy do not know this standard. Instead of giving it such prominence on the main navigation, I place it in the utility links (upper right hand corner.)

Comments have been closed