Anti-navigation

Here is a collection of pervasive anti-navigational aids. All of these tend to introduce "link noise" that obscure the site structure and navigational paths.

Embedded links

Embedded, or in-line, links can destroy navigation. A couple of years ago, it was considered good style to have in-line text linking to related text. Well, now it is considered very bad style.

There are two reasons: embedded links distract, and embedded links smear navigational cues. A word or phrase within prose that is blue and underlined is screaming "Click me!". So you click it, and where do you end up? Who knows? Unless the purpose and target of the link are abundantly clear, the link adds an additional navigational path with no clear connection to the other navigational paths on the page, and therefore to the site's structure.

Embedded links can only be useful when:

1. It is clear what kind of information you are going to get if you click on the link.
2. It is clear that the link is to information that is useful as a reference, but not essential to what you are reading now.

   For example, I will use the title of a book or article as an embedded link:

   In his book Usability Engineering, Jakob Neilson states that...

   Cross-references with the same document, as long as they are clearly labeled as such, are OK too:

   In addition to providing access to the start-to-end trail, this device gives the reader a compact and unambiguous location cue (see Location cues).

   Here is a sample of text containing embedded links that are not only distracting, but in the case of the first two and last three, misleading:

   Ptolemy is a research project and software environment focused on the design of .... The work is conducted in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California at Berkeley. The project is directed by Prof. Edward Lee and Prof. David Messerschmitt. The project is named after the second century Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer.

   This advice does not apply to pages that use links as part of the art of the medium, like Suck.
   Links to links

   Links from a TOC at the top of a page to sections within the page are useful only if the linked-to section itself contains information. Go here:

   W3C Technical Reports & Publications

   and click on the link that says "World-Wide Web Journal". You go to a section of the same page that contains... one link to the World-Wide Web journal! This is the worst possible case, but my general advice is simply this: don't link to links. You are adding, in effect, additional levels to a hierarchy (assuming you even have that much structure) that, at best, adds cognitive overhead.
   Destroying back-track

   An increasing number of sites are starting to play a little trick on their visitors, which is to effectively disable the back-button. For example, go here:

   Microsoft Office

   and then click on the Back button in your browser. Like that?

   Jakob Neilson calls the ability to back-track "perhaps the most important navigation facility." Back-track is "a lifeline for the user who.. can still get back to familiar territory." This trick destroys back-track -- one has to question the attitude of a company that treats its visitors like that.