Contact Us
I love viewing peoples’ portfolios online. I get to see the work people put effort into, sometimes in their free time! The really special treats are the ones that aren’t using a template (or an easily recognizable template 😛); regardless of the design, it’s so much fun seeing what people do. These sites generally some sort of “About me” page with a “Contact” link.
I also really like going to “About” and “Contact Us” pages for startups. These pages give me a sense of their culture and brand. These also have a “Contact” link/button.
This “Contact” link is always a risky click. I’ve seen two approaches on the contents of that link:
- Clicking opens a different part of their website with links to social media, like twitter, linkedin, email, and others.
- Clicking opens my email client.
The second approach bothers me a lot, though both approaches are flawed. The user loses all agency in these links. Tell me how I will be contacting you, don’t surprise me with my Mail.app opening, or getting redirected to some random page. This is especially important today where browsers no longer show the destination of a link.
I realize that a potential customer or job or connection might be reached through clicking that email opening contact button, but I think when the action is unexpected, the immediate response is to close the email client.
I’ve made a pact to myself that any “Contact us” link/button should inform the user about what clicking the link will do.
Some examples:
<a href="mailto:isthisnagee@gmail.com">email<a><a href="mailto:isthisnagee@gmail.com">isthisnagee@gmail.com<a><a href="...">Contact us via form</a>
The “Contact” link is critical for some people, it’s the reason why people put it near their site’s navbar, and users should not be turned away because of a “gotcha”.
I wonder if there’s a better way to indicate that the “Contact” link behaves differently while making it consistent with the other links on the nav. Icons?