Social icons for volunteers and developers open in same window

[mentalcaries]

The volunteer and developer pages display a list of social icons which link to corresponding social pages. In their current implementation, they navigate users away from the page.
It would be better to have these pages open in a new tab so that it's easier to return to the TCL website for further browsing.

[mxmason]

Thank you for filing this, @mentalcaries!

While there is no absolute consensus with this (there rarely is with anything UX-related), research has demonstrated that automatically opening links in new tabs is harmful to user experience. Among other problems, forcing a link to open in a new window can have a negative impact for distracted or cognitively impaired users, or introduce complications for Blind or low-vision users who rely on screen magnifiers or screen readers. The solution to this, like much of good web design, is to give users a choice. Because we don't force the tab to open in a new tab, the user can choose to open our links in a new tab if they want to. To my knowledge, there is no way to opt out of the open-in-new-tab behavior if a link has been coded that way.

Some research on this topic, if you'd like to read it:

• Opening links in new browser windows and tabs (Nielsen Norman Group)
• Links and hypertext (WebAIM)

[mentalcaries]

@mxmason Thanks for this information. It actually makes a lot more sense in that context