This advice is so old, what's next, an article on top of HN on why you should never use tables? ...
Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#32This is a fantastic article, and the first time I've ever come across anything addressing these issues.
The only thing I don't entirely agree with is:
1) Wrong: "first Falling Bear gets run over" 2) Right: "first Falling Bear gets run over"
I think they're just different. In the first case, I expect a link to to a photo of Falling Bear as he's getting run over. In the second case, I expect a link to a page on Falling Bear, that may have nothing to do with when he was run over.
But I think the distinction is important to make.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#33Click here to read why you should probably ignore this advice: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30124
I believe people process text faster than they process visual cues like fancy icons or underlined anchor links. "Click here to view demo" seems to be faster to process, and more explicit than a fancy "View demo" hyperlink (CSS re-styling of links does not help in that respect). This is pure speculation of course, but one might try to do the reaction-time experiment.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#34D Curtis' A/B testing data does not support this: http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....
Amen! From a marketing point of view you're 100% correct. In marketing this is known as a "call to action". This is why all of the terrible meme graphics on facebook say "share this" -- while the usability "expert" may hate this it works. And honestly I may dislike it, but it's not about me -- it's about the user.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#35Oooh Netiquette!
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#36It's more than just links. Anything you want the user to interact with should be self-explanatory. Buttons shouldn't say yes/no or ok/cancel. They should describe the actual action. "Leave this page" or "stay on this page", "Remove from cart" or "keep in cart", and so on.
I'm not convinced -- I find the Vista dialogs really confusing for that reason. First, I read the question, "Do you want to save this file?" Then I naturally expect "Yes", "No", "Cancel" -- effortless to understand. If I see "Save this file", "Don't save this file", "Return to application", it takes a lot longer, because I have to parse each button, which is redundant and annoying since I' already parsed the question…
There shouldn't be a question if it's only going to repeat what your dialog options say -- you don't ask "do you want to save?", you just put up "save file", "exit without saving", or "return to program" without any question at all.
Also, yes/no/cancel are only "effortless" to understand if you read the question first (not everyone does that) and if the question is simple.
An example of doing it wrong: my classroom had an unstable piece of software that would occasionally pop up a long error message that asked "do you wish to continue?" at the end; students wouldn't read the whole thing, but would just click "no", which closed the software.
If the same popup had the error message and then buttons marked "continue" or "close program", it would have been far more straightforward.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#37So this advice is as old as the Internet hills.
Does anyone actually have strong evidence supporting it (i.e. quantifiable UX studies)?
I've always found the reasons given for this kind of thing rather vague and arguable:
- Don't use click: I really doubt users care
- Don't use 'here': fine, being specific is good where you can
- Link to nouns: seems arguable. Surely if you're linking to a bear then use the noun. If you're linking to a bear getting run over, 'getting run over' is the action here, and should be the link, especially if you have more than one action to link to.
- Link to specifics: yeah, you already said that one.
- End on a link. Hmm.. I'd need to see numbers to believe it
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#38I think the "here" habit also has to do with cases in which the CSS has failed to demarcate the link from the rest of the text.
The article gives some good advice, but I think it's always worth considering that links should be emphasized in the context of both HTML and CSS (and static images and any JS magic).
Although I think the word "click" should not be a part of any link in 2012, you shouldn't follow this guide unquestioningly in other regards.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#39The problem is that the article seems to give advices based on the personal opinion of the author and has no data to test his theories. By testing different versions on my web sites I often got better results from "ugly formulations" like "click here to order" than something "pure" that has no call to action. What I found was the most important is that the context must be clear and descriptive of what the user will find the other side of the link but also contain some call to action.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#40Without data it's hard to agree with these "conclusions"
At very least if you are planning to change around your links based on this article give a look to Dustin Curtis' data-driven experiment on changing link names:
www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html