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10.24.07
Eleven Link Usability Tips
 By
Philipp Lenssen
Who ever said that underlining a part of sentence is the best way to reference information?
Hyperlinks just happen to work like this, and the fact that they've taken off may be an indicator of their usefulness in itself, but one could imagine other ways to reference information. The browser may display a "context" menu for instance so you can navigate sites. Or there may be a side-bar which show thumbnails of relevant articles & sites. In any case, as long as we have links, we better make sure we create them in their most useful ways. Here are some (subjective) tips for doing so:
1. Make sure there's enough space to click on for a given link. Do you know those A-Z link lists? They're a common navigation element on top of some directory-style pages, going like this: "A | B | C | D | ..." etc., where each letter is linked. In this case, some letters - especially the "I" - become much too small to comfortably click on. Use a non-breaking space around each letter ("... I ...") to increase the clickable area, allowing for easier navigation. You might also want to use this approach for link text like numbers (e.g. "1") or symbols (e.g. "#").
2. The first link should be the most important. As a rule of thumb - and there may be exceptions - the first link in a blog post or article will gain the most attention, and the highest click rates. So make sure it's also the most relevant one for your article. If you are discussing new website XYZ, then make a link to XYZ the first link in your article - not necessarily within the first sentence, but just the first link - and put links to related material over subsequent words. This allows visitors to be guided best.
3. Select which links are important, and don't link to everything. If you write an article you are often filtering for your audience. One such filter is to only link to pages that are truly relevant to get your point across (or to allow readers to cross-check it for validation). If you include a link in every second word of a sentence, then it will hurt readability as people don't always know which links are worth to follow. (One noteworthy exception are those "train links" which, on purpose, link e.g. half a dozen words to different reference sites. It can be a style element to indicate for instance "a lot of people discussed this issue before.")
4. Don't add gadgets to links. Have you seen those links which open an info box when you hover over them? Snap.com, for instance, offers such a service. I suggest not to use it; it might be fun once, but it gets very annoying very quickly for your audience.
People use links for all kinds of purposes; they might right-click them to open them in a new window, they may copy them for their own post, they may click on them to quickly follow to a site. Such an info box on the other hand only helps with one use-case - wanting to know more about a site without actually visiting it - while putting the burden of clutter & micro-lags to almost all other use cases. (A more subtle way to give more information for a link is to use the "title" attribute on the anchor tag. Any kind of JavaScript links on the other hand can create accessibility problems, so they are better used only sparsely and only when really justified.)
5. Make links scannable. You might have heard of microcontent, as the Nielsen concept is pretty old in web years. When link text becomes microcontent, it means it can be understood out of context. Thus, avoid link text like "here" or "click" and try, if at all possible (and it's not always possible - again, there are exceptions to most rules) to use a link text that can be considered the title of the document you are referring to.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.
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