Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Ick! I just saw an instance of my all-time Web pet peeve on one of our sites.  It's the phrase "click here" underlined as a link on a web page.  Please don't even let people catch you doing this on your intranet! Here's why.

Links Are Visual Attractors

Long ago during early usability testing on sun.com, we observed that most users scanned a typical page in a distinctly non-sequential pattern.

Rather than reading a page starting with the very top of the screen and then continuing to the bottom, as you would expect, we found that users skip around a lot. The priority of what they look at is something more like this:

1. Meaningful pictures or graphics (if they don't look like an ad or border, see below)
2. Links (blue or blue underlines especially)
3. Meaningful headlines
4. Bulleted text
5. Short paragraphs
6. Long paragraphs
7. ... everything else ...
   
8. [Last: Things that look like ads, especially in borders, which users intentionally tune out unless they are in a shopping mode.]

That means link text is one of the very first things people scan for on a page. Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen and I both observed these patterns informally when we tested early sun.com site designs with our customers, and Jakob later formalized the experiment and published the results in an Alert Box article, How Users Read on the Web. The web scanning principles Jakon mentions in this article still hold true today.

So, Why "Click Here" is Bad

"Click here" is so bad because it forces the eye away from the important content.  For instance, try reading the following:


The important concepts are Solaris, ZFS, Java games, and airplane tracking demo. But it's hard for your eye to pull these concepts out of the text above because the 'click here" text is jumping out everywhere as a strong visual attractor. Still, you'll see examples of the 'click here' phenomenon every day, and even occasionally on big sites like ours.

There's a really great bulleted summary on this subject called Why 'Click Here' is a Bad Linking Practice on a Finland CS site you should visit.