I remember a business manager having zero idea that clicking the logo at the top of a webpage would often take you to the home page. I had assumed this was ubiquitously understood, but clearly not.

It seems people don't explore at all. There's no "I wonder what would happen if" impulse, or there's an "I'd better not just in case" worry.

And the lack of tooltips on hover. WTF, it's missing on loads of big properties.

Mobile platforms are the worst when it comes to having any understanding at all over where a link (or linked element) will take you and I don't think that's unintentional.

>> I had assumed this was ubiquitously understood, but clearly not.

Some anecdotal evidence to support this.

I work for a very large health care company. We recently redesigned one of our portals. During the UX research phase, one of the tasks was to go back to the home page via the logo - one of the researchers had an idea we were assuming all of our users should/would know this since but we still have a large portion of our users are older, retirees or aging Gen Xers. It was a hunch at the time - nothing more.

The research showed a large enough percentage of people couldn't complete the task in a timely manner whereas on the new design, the logo is now just an SVG, with no link. We have a dedicated "Home" link now on the main navigation which in testing, 100% of the people were now able to complete the task in a timely manner.

I think it really stunned quite a few people since this has seemingly been a standard design pattern for so long. I was pretty stunned hearing the research team talking about it.

Frankly, I would think the Gen X people would be the most familiar with the pattern. I'm Gen X and I grew up with computers from the Commodore 64 to modern computers. I learned about the clicking the logo to go to the home page back in the mid-90s, even before I became a web developer myself. It was my generation that came up with that design pattern.

> the logo is now just an SVG, with no link.

Why not both? Genuine question.

Jef Raskin: "Intuitive" == familiar.

User never used/discovered it before == not familiar.