One of my biggest irritations on the earth is the use of “Click Here” for hyperlinks. Website users, myself included, scan content quickly. We don’t want to read every word. We scan pages for headings, hyperlinks, lists, and pictures. Anything that stands out.
The great thing about a descriptive hyperlink is that I know what I’m going to get when I click on the link as soon as I read the link text. If it says “Click Here” I need to read the text around the hyperlink to understand the context of the link.
It sounds like a small thing, but as impatient as Web users are, you need to do everything you can to avoid annoying them and get them to the information they seek as quickly as possible.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
- Click here to read Jakob Nielsen’s report on writing for the web.
- Jakob Nielsen’s report on writing for the web is a must read.
Which one is understandable more quickly?
I bring this up because over the weekend, I was reading an article in The State newspaper on the front page of the Drive section from Saturday, June 6, 2009. They obviously copied this article directly from a website, but in the article it says, “Click here to compare…” Last I checked, I can’t click on a newspaper. Nice to see the editors of the newspaper are paying attention.
Below is another of my favorite examples of all-time. This is from the Consumer Reports website. See how long it takes you to understand which “click here” you need to click on to take some action.
Click on the image to see the full-size version
Instead of simply listing available actions and hyperlinking those actions, they forced me to spend 20 seconds reading the entire page so I could understand what I needed to do. I could have gotten it in 3 seconds if they had done this:
I hope you can see that “click here” has got to go. It is a lazy way to write Web content. It makes reading and navigating on the Web much more difficult, and is completely unnecessary if we simply spend a few extra seconds to figure out how we can create descriptive hyperlinks.
Thank you for your support.
June 10, 2009 at 6:37 am |
Amen, and you should send that newspaper clip to failblog.org.
I think there’s more to it than just having to read the words around the link. The Jakob Nielson example still requires that you read the words around it to understand what the link is. Maybe it’s also that you’re not required to do two separate things cognitively: read text for information about the link, and read text that’s not informative but is basically an empty placeholder, a nongraphic button of sorts. Maybe?
June 10, 2009 at 9:40 am |
I think you’re on to something there. Your brain has to process, as you put it, a meaningless placeholder before moving on to the rest of the words. Web users almost always scan a page for links before reading any regular text. So you’re really doing two or three things mentally, when you should only have to do one.
Again, it’s one of those things that probably isn’t fatal to a web page, but why not make the experience for your visitor as easy and painless as possible? There’s no need to antagonize your readers with poor content.
(Then again, some might say this entire blog antagonizes the readers!)
June 10, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I kinda figured that was the whole point behind blogging in general.
June 11, 2009 at 4:58 pm |
Loved the newspaper example. That’s classic.
“Click Here” is a nightmare for those using screen readers and other assistive technology as well — click might be a foreign concept to them, so why tell them to do that? That’s why every accessibility guideline in the world says those words should be banished. It doesn’t translate across devices much less mediums.
June 11, 2009 at 5:10 pm |
Great point. I put “Click Here” right up there with scrolling marquees and Flash in the pantheon of usability nightmares.