You have to know through experience or learning. It is impossible to figure out their function from their appearance. So why has the blue underline proved so long-lived? A clue lies in the fact that, according to Jakob Nielsen, “life is too short to click on things you do not understand.” He is right links have to be instantly recognizable as such to be usable. Blue Underlined Hyperlinks and Usability The Pros
In the very first browser prototypes, such as Berners-Lee’s original Three decades later and the blue underline still has a stranglehold on link marker visualization, even though internet consumption habits, device use, interfaces and even how we point and click, have gone through a revolution. The blue underline formatting of conventional hyperlinks is a vestigial trait from the days when UI designers had very little scope for design creativity. Is it time for the hyperlink to change too? The History of Hyperlinks In the 3 decades since Berners-Lee nominated the link as the foundational element of web surfing, everything has changed. But conventional hyperlink design has both good and bad implications for user experience, particularly in the constantly evolving UI landscape. The majority of sites follow the convention of blue underlined hyperlinks with greater or lesser adherence to the best practices found on W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They are just always there, which might be why site owners and web designers do not focus on link usability issues as much as they should. Usable hyperlinks are the essence of good user experience.ĭespite hyperlinks’ centrality to the user experience, connecting pages, sites, people and ideas with a single click, hyperlink design and its impact on usabilityis not a hot UI/UX discussion topic. Usable links mean, according to Justin Mifsud, that users can “achieve the objective of why they are in your website… (which) will positively affect their experience.” Links – “text or a graphic that indicates it can be clicked,” in Microsoft’s words, are still the primary means by which users navigate the web, moving within a site or to external related sites through clicks. No wonder that hyperlinks are integral to the internet experience and have been since the dawn of interconnectivity, when Tim Berners-Lee described the web as simply “documents and links.” That is 88 webpages a day, and almost 900 links seen, if not clicked.īased on the above figures, it can be estimated that on average, users are running across 27,000 links a month, or 324,000 links a year. A 2010 Nielsen report estimated that the average user visits 2,646 different web pages per day, each of which may have up to 100 hyperlinks on them. Interacting with them is perhaps the most frequent action done by users every time they go online.
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