Posted by jonathanberger 10/23/2024
If you use real link, your training people to trust what the text says is actually where you're going to go..
By making people do extra work to see where click here goes you might actually be training to protect themselves... Of course that doesn't work when Outlook goes and wraps the whole thing in a safety URL you can't see past... Or with shorteners.. but in all of those cases, I know to be more cautious.
If you're designing software that displays links provided by untrusted third parties, that's beyond the scope of what this article is addressing.
That bullshit really needs to end. It's making people more likely to fall for phishing scams when they can't figure out the URL.
People struggle with discovery, even though they shouldn't.
I ask because you say people struggle with discovery, but modern UI trends are all about simplifying and flattening, which comes at the cost of discovery.
I remember in the 90s, links were typically blue and underlined, maybe even bold? Links stuck out like a sore thumb. These days, that's considered ugly, and you might be lucky if links are even underlined.
Then I got a call from my Mom: "I typed in the web address, now what do I do?"
To me, it was obvious: hit Enter. But MS had done their A/B testing, and that Go button was for the beginning user.
For the OP to assume that everyone is as adept as they are is folly. As another user lamented, sometimes you have to rub the user's nose in it for them to know they can click something.
Everything needs to look clean and uniform, discoverability be damned.
Looking nice in a screenshot is more important than being usable.
description : >Click here<
Some exceptions are hypertext heavy documents, like wikipedia, or a dictionary. But if you want to point somewhere, refer something, or provide an option to an action, you shouldn't put that in the middle of a sentence or in the middle of a line. Put it at the end.
> It's not 1995.
I agree in principle with the article. But I have spent time reading help desk tickets so I know that average users often don't know where to click unless you push their nose in it. I can't count how many times users have said "I was afraid to click the link" or "I don't know where that button will go" because the UI presented links and buttons with meaningful titles instead of imperative commands. I just have to watch my parents try to navigate a web site to feel deep humility about how I think people use the web. They got stuck in 1995 I guess.
This kind of advice should come with A/B testing on actual users. I think we would all facepalm at the results.
Not to mention "click here" is a call to action and a random blue link is not. Call to actions are important.
You have people today who don't even know what a link is.
Two factor has resulted in similar berating. “How dare someone click APPROVE at 2am?!” Well, they were trying to silence the phone when they were attempting to sleep. Why are you allowing pushes outside of business hours without an additional layer of security? Maybe that giant APPROVE button isn’t the best default option at 2am?
Numerous studies tell us that people don't read web pages, or don't read much of the text on the page. A big "click here" helps in that case, a call to action as another commenter wrote. As long as the page or email just has one call to action.
The need for the link text to say the action or name of destination of the link, and to grammatically fit within the sentence, makes translation tricky.
Poorly translated sites are hard to use for the majority of the world for whom English is not a first language, and overall this effect might outweigh the benefits of descriptive link text.