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Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

uxmovement.com

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Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#71

Post by Evbn »

ams6110 wrote: post #56
jiggy2011 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how your parents would fare if you were to give them a tablet? "Click here? how do I plug the mouse in?"

Sigh. Reminds me of my (late) mother, who would accidentally click on the "Subject" header in Outlook (causing messages to be sorted by subject) and have no idea what happened or why messages were no longer sorted in the order they arrived. She would call me saying her email "looks all different" for "no reason"

The most fun was the Win98 start menu task bar that moves around the page at the flick of your finger when you misclick

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#72

Post by Evbn »

aresant wrote: post #40

Without 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

Every idiot already copied Dustins conclusion and ignored his research. This article deserves an award for the most intelligent thoughtful accurate article that broke the web because its readers are idiots.

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#73

Post by Evbn »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #10

See also the classic advice from the w3c: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

That's very bad advice that misunderstand the distinction between objects and actions and is completely uninformed by psychologically or marketing insights. It's fine for a semantic Web for robot archivists, but poor for human users.

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#74

Post by Evbn »

kalleboo wrote: post #29

I was going to mention SEO and use the example of googling for "click here", but I was surprised how the wikipedia article on the phenomenon in the OP ("Mystery meat navigation"[1]) actually managed to make it to #3, amidst downloads for Acrobat Reader, QuickTime, Java runtime etc. How did Google manage that? I'm impressed. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

Google downplays link text after the "miserable failure" incident, and only that Wikipedia page has the search keyword on the content page itself.

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#76

Post by j_s »

I love uxmovement.com, always fighting the good fight for academic purity (eg. "things should work this way") instead of practical reality (eg. "this is how it really works").

Hopefully they're only 5-10 years ahead of everyone else; imagine the SEO juice they'll have then!

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#77

Post by user49598 »

While semantically this makes sense, and aesthetically it's preferable to some, I would guess that it really doesn't align with actual human behavior.

Theory: When you want someone to do something, they will do it more often if you tell them to than if you just hint at it. When people read text, they assume someone else has written it and subconsciously invent a small narrative in their head. If this narrative tells them to do something, they are more likely to do it than if the narrative just lets them know something exists. And that's essentially what we're getting at. What this article is supposing is that, people will more likely do something if you let them know it exists than if you tell them to do it. I sadly disagree. Am I going to put 'click here' on my own sites? No, it seems kind of trashy and turn of the century. But there is a legitimate use for it.

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#78

Post by JoshTriplett »

Evbn wrote: post #73
JoshTriplett wrote: post #10

See also the classic advice from the w3c: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

That's very bad advice that misunderstand the distinction between objects and actions and is completely uninformed by psychologically or marketing insights. It's fine for a semantic Web for robot archivists, but poor for human users.

Care to clarify what you mean by the "distinction between objects and actions"?

If you mean actions within a web application that cause something to happen, then the w3c didn't misunderstand that at all; they simply didn't take it into account because the web at that time didn't have nearly as much of that as it did hyperlinked static content.

Apart from that, the w3c wrote that advice for for people intending to construct a useful hyperlinked web of information, not for people building deliberately manipulative copy. Consider the target audience.

Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”

#80

Post by einhverfr »

Evbn wrote: post #70
einhverfr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be an important point, but it makes me wonder if "click here to order" would be less effective than "order today." Certainly the latter contains a call to action and perhaps a better one. Again it's a question but one which I have not studied in terms of user behavior.

The former is a simpler more immediate action that is easier to induce.

The second is more imperative.

As I say, I don't have data on this, but it would be interesting to study.

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