Page links are links that, instead of taking you to another page, simply scroll you down to another location on the current page. When people see links, they typically assume that they’ll lead to a new page, so to avoid confusion, it’s a good idea to explicitly label such links, like this:
On This Page: Lions – Tigers – Bears
or
Scroll Down To: A B C D E F G H I J
These can be convenient shortcuts on long pages, but they can create some unusual navigation confusions.
Imagine clicking on Tigers in the previous example: you view the tigers, browse around the page, scroll back to the top, and then decide this page doesn’t have that what you want. So then you click the Back button on your browser – and it leaves you in the same spot!
You expected it to take you to the previous page, but it actually took you to the previous position on the same page when you last clicked a page link. For this reason, we recommend keeping links to the absolute minimal usage. Label the page links clearly and avoid linking back and forth all over the page.
Back to Top links are also fairly popular. The theory is that they save scrolling time, and when used in conjunction with page links at the top of a page, a user can jump down to a particular item and easily jump back up to the navigation options.
However, scrolling down to the exact spot is the hard part; scrolling back up to the top is fairly fast and easy, so this doesn’t buy you much time. After using a series of page links and Back to Top links, a user will find that the behavior of the Back and Forward buttons is very confusing. Consider this tradeoff before using Back to Top links.
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