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We are a large company and our suite of application can have at its maximum 300 links for the various pages across it.

its very rare for a customer to purchase the entire suite of application. Lest assume the average customer will have 25 links.

I assume that 25 or more links is a good enough reason to use a favorite feature in order to make the navigation menu (of the links) more usable.

I found an article by Nielsen which generally is positive about using features (referred as custom links). https://www.nngroup.com/articles/quicklinks-label-intranet/

My colleague argues that nobody uses this feature on such scales of navigation menus.

My question is, when is it a bad practice to use favorite feature ? and why (would like for resources positive or negative on this issue)

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    Can you categorize these links at all to make them easier to navigate and reduce cognitive load? Also, could you use some form of personalization to sort or show items that are most relevant to the user at hand, maybe based off their role, title, location, history of use on the site? Often times users will not make the effort to mark items as their 'favorites', or they may not even know how to do it.
    – hbowman
    Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 20:57
  • Yes to all of the above. We can do all the suggested ideas. Do you have article concerning the effort issue you raised?
    – AsafBO
    Commented Jul 14, 2016 at 5:56
  • Mostly this is from my own years of experience working on intranet and portal websites, but Nielsen Norman does have a good article. "Still, there are countless tales of companies investing heavily in customization only to find that users rarely — if ever — customize. There are also numerous studies that tout users' desire for customization, but (as we know) what users say is often at odds with what they actually do." nngroup.com/articles/customization-of-uis-and-products
    – hbowman
    Commented Jul 14, 2016 at 13:22

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Having a favourite system generally isn't a bad idea, it just is a somewhat low priority one compared to all the other stuff you can do - like reducing cognitive load of the navigation in question.

In the case of websites, intranet or not, be aware that the browser already comes with an option for this (bookmarks!), so you essentially have that feature for free already.

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