Where visitors expect links to be

A link location study by The Software Usability Research Laboratory of Wichita State University gave very useful results. Major findings:

• Most people expect links within the site to be in a column on the left side.
• People expect the "back to home" link to be at the top of the left column.

The study included over 300 people with an average web experience of three years and an average age of 20 (but varying from 18 to 63). Participants were asked to indicate where on an 8x7 grid of a web page they would expect to find certain types of links.

The link location study »