UX Magazine has been in its beta stage for quite a few months now. It looks sophisticated and fabulous offering a good total user experience.
However, I do think that the ‘Open in New Window” checkbox located in the footer on the right is not going to be a feature that increases usability, not because of its location, rather because it’s not going to be used much.
For instance, most people who visit UX Magazine are, I’m guessing as should be the case, power users. IMHO, a power user and novice alike would prefer that they choose depending on the link they are about to explore whether to open it in a new window or the same rather than have an option that simply opens all links in a new window whether they like it or not.
Secondly, a power user would use the right-click menu to open up links in the same window or new so the ‘Open in New Window’ is not going to be used much by them. If the developers are tracking how much this feature has been used, I’m sure they’d find a few hits from first time visitors, power users to be precise, who would like to simply check it out.
It’s a cool feature to try out but I’m not sure whether it really is enhancing usability on the website. If the website had a target audience which was balanced by a fair amount of novice users, it would have made good sense.
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