Nov 16 2009
On Link Styles – Are We Regressing?
This will be a short post, as I’ve written about link styles before, specifically about how using underlined links in body text is still a best practice. If underlining is out of the question, then at least use a color that is in complete contrast to the text color. Why am I bringing this up again? I happened to be browsing some higher ed sites earlier this afternoon and I couldn’t help but notice that the trend seems to be getting worse, not better. Why?
Is it that we’re spending so much time focused on more complex user-friendliness issues (ie., can users navigate the site, is our online application usable, etc) that it’s almost like we’ve forgotten one of the fundamentals?
Dressing up link text with hover styles does nothing for the scanning eye. Finding what words are links on a website shouldn’t be an easter egg hunt. We should know *immediately* when we glance at a page that a word or phrase is a link, not after we move the mouse over it.
Take a look at these examples. Can you tell where the link text is immediately? Now imagine these little snippets were part of a much larger page with much more text. Do you still think you could pick out the links without really staring at the page – or worse, without “mouse hunting?”
There is 1 link in the above example.
There are 4 links in the above example.
There are 4 links in the above example.
There are 2 links in the above example.
There is 1 link in the above example.
Compare the examples above to these.
It’s interesting that almost all of the websites that don’t underline links use a different link style on hover, usually a vastly different style (different background color, normal-to-bold, underline, italicize, etc). Some of the hover styles add in the underline when the user hovers over the non-underlined link. What sense does this make? It’s not apparent that it’s a link until you hover? I don’t get it. There’s nothing wrong with hover styles. It can’t be the only (or easiest) way to find a link, though.
How could we measure the effectiveness of this? Good question. Can we really measure the effectiveness of changing our link styles? An easy way, obviously, is to do a quick usability test. Can we do it using our analytics tool, though? I think so. If your site uses Google Analytics and uses Site Overlay, you could measure before and after changing your link styles to see if making them more visible increase clicks. I bet it will. I think that would be an interesting test.
Let’s get back to basics and start underlining our links again. Who’s with me?
I think you are 100% right. We are regressing. Links are becoming buried in text and that’s a big negative as far as usability is concerned. It’s all done for the sake of style, but we all know that non-underlined links don’t look all that much better and we also know that getting visitors to the information that they need is key. When they’re spending 7 seconds on a page is the style of the text more important or scanability?
Cheers!
An even better idea is to use Chalkmark – a free usability testing tool from Optimal Workshop. (Free version is very useful, however paid versions are more flexible – and are still cheap). http://www.optimalworkshop.com/
Create an online test of any prototype (eg JPG of a design with 2 different link styles) and ask a questions like “Find information on widgets”. Chalkmark aggregates all responses into a heatmap.
Takes minutes to set up and minutes to run.
Brian and Tom – thanks for the comments.
@Brian – I wonder why this is? As you say, do you think it’s because we are going for style over usability? It seems this is the case, but it doesn’t make sense to me as there seems to *finally* be a shift toward user-centric at university websites. At least there seems to be the understanding now that usability testing is a necessary thing. It’s just odd to me that in the basic things (link styles, etc.) we’ve regressed yet with more complex things (navigation, etc.) we’re progressing.
@Tom – I haven’t used this tool before, but I will definitely check it out. Thank you.
Great post! I still think links should be underlined and I am going to put my site back to the way it was….underlined!