Comments on: On Link Styles – Are We Regressing?

By: frank mihal

frank mihal — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:10:56 +0000

Great post! I still think links should be underlined and I am going to put my site back to the way it was….underlined!

By: Shelby Thayer

Shelby Thayer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:51:36 +0000

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.

By: Tom Butlin

Tom Butlin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:40:30 +0000

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.

By: Brian Smith

Brian Smith — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:20:29 +0000

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!