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Most of the other answers here seem to be focusing on accessibility, which is fine, but is hardly the point. Screen readers are what? Less than 5% of the market for a general website? The reason "Here" and "Click Here" are bad is because they are useless words. They provide no context. This isn't an accessibility issue; it is a usability issue.
There's an ...
144
When links were new (think 1995), designers felt that it was necessarily to let people know that something was a link by saying "here". I'm not sure if it was ever necessary, but it is not necessary now. When people see text formatted as a link, they know it's a link.
Using "here" as the link text gives no context (which is especially bad for screen ...
126
tl;dr → use familiar patterns
Make the text objects look less like navigational tab controls.
The elements seem unnecessarily divided: Place the search field in the main header.
Make search look more like search.
Position matters
The subconscious factor making your test subjects want to tap those text objects is positioning. They appear to be tabbed ...
124
Well, since people are trying to interact with this information, I'd use it as an advantage. As mentioned by Mattynabib, it really makes sense.
However, if for some reason you prefer not to, the answer would be to make this snippets of information a homogeneous message. The way it is now, it looks like a mix of a marketing and an interactive element (hence ...
77
My suggestion would be to make the Title and the image click-able. The reasons are as follows
The title is generally referenced as the link to go to the actual item and is generally click-able. You can see this in a number of sites including Amazon,Ebay and Google news where the title is click-able and is as the main link for users to go and check out the ...
52
One aspect of this is accessibility. You don't get any context from the link itself.
You can see further info on wc3: Don't use "click here" as link text
When calling the user to action, use brief but meaningful link text
that:
provides some information when read out of context
explains what the link offers
-doesn't talk about mechanics
...
52
I would suggest using the dotted underline approach for abbreviation/acronyms. This is good way to let the user know that if they hover/click SSN it means Social Security Number. For more descriptive items like contextual inline help, us an information icon of "i" or a "?" icon for added assistance. The javascript/jQuery plugin I use is qTip2.
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The idea of 'click here' being a bad idea originated from data about how people visually scan web pages which show that people don't read online: they skim the page to get the key information. If someone is scanning, 'click here' (particularly if there are lots of them!) links are totally meaningless in isolation: the user has to spend time reading around ...
51
Where was this first seen
This practice dates back at least to the earliest days of image hyperlinks.
For example, the Internet Archive's earliest snapshot of Yahoo's home page from October 1996 has a clickable Yahoo! logo.
Why has it become an industry standard?
1. Convention
Conventions are self-perpetuating. Given the ubiquity of this practice, users ...
50
It's become standard because everyone does it.
Everyone does it because it's nice to have a 'home' link but it's not something that needs to clutter the menu, either. Hence the idea to just make the logo link to the home page.
Not sure if anyone can answer where this was first seen. But I recall doing it close to 2 decades ago so I think its been around ...
42
Your question is complicated in that it's embedded in a bad practice.
This Smashing Magazine article about why your links should never say "Click here" sums it up quite well.
"Click" puts too much emphasis on mouse mechanics, "here" conceals what is being clicked, and in your example, "go to" is implicit in the action of a link.
Assuming for the sake ...
41
The grey text actually makes them look more clickable as they stand out from the rest of the header. I would change them to the same color as the rest of the text (black).
Also, instead of "6 books Listed", I would use "Books Listed: 6". The colon subtly implies, "here's info" rather than "I'm a link".
39
It emphasizes the wrong part of the text, like this.
Links tend to be visually distinctive, and draw the eye. (Less so now that they're not underlined in most cases.) But the 'here' is the least important part of the text, really, and so the link disrupts the reading flow.
30
The short answer to the high level UX question here is -- it depends -- so here are a few cases why a company like discourse might choose to put click counters next to their hyperlinks along with things to watch out for...
I'm new here what does everyone else click?
Sometimes when I visit a new restaurant I'll ask the waiter what most people order. This ...
30
or you can try dotted border; be sure to test it on the users though.
If it's a quick reference and no action (like selecting / scrolling, although you can do it on the pop-up with some effort) is required on pop-up, I would suggest to differentiate with actions in addition to the style:
Regular links (click -> another page)
Hover on link + help cursor (...
29
From a historical viewpoint, I suspect the reason is simply "because someone thought it would be a good idea".
In fact, I did a little bit of digging. The padlock icon for HTTPS links was first introduced to MediaWiki in 2004 as part of the then-new MonoBook skin by Gabriel Wicke. Specifically, it first appears (along with a generic link icon and special ...
29
A button performs an action. E.g. Save, delete, register, submit.
A link connects you to resource. E.g. a URL or a file.
Think of buttons as verbs and links as nouns.
That said, there are also other distinctions. Often a link is used where you would have a button, but where you want to de-emphasise the action. Often for secondary options or high risk ...
27
As I disagree with a lot of the notions here I am going to add an opposing view as well. Like most answers I agree that the image and title should be clickable, but in modern designs making the entire box clickable is quite acceptable.
Now, first I would like to point out that in the latest Youtube iteration the entire box is clickable:
Additionally I ...
27
Browsers render textlinks blue by default. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an article stating Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, reached it at random:
http://alistapart.com/blog/post/why-are-links-blue
I can't find any information on why visited links are purple. It does however seems logical to me to choose a color close to the link color, ...
25
I would answer no, the terminal punctuation should not be included in the hyperlink. It is the text that is being hyperlinked rather than the construct that the text is a part of.
Consider other such constructs: in an unordered list you wouldn't include the bullet point in a hyperlink, in an ordered list you wouldn't include the number, and in a comma-...
24
I don't have much in the way of hard data to back this up, but a number of sites which host user-generated links (eg. news aggregators, Wikipedia) specifically ban shortened URLs for trust reasons. Joshua Schachter (creator of Delicious) wrote a blog post explaining some of the issues with them.
22
It's a verb phrase because it's a call to action; in your blog example it's also navigation, but it's not the same as labeling a link "click here to go to X". Users already know how links work and they want to know where the link goes or in this occasion what a link does.
Calls to action are usually buttons because of the visual differentiation and ...
21
It is not so clear for people using screen readers. Often all the text is read out first followed by a list of all the hyperlinks. If the hyperlinks are just named things like 'Click Here' then there is no context as to what that link is for. However if it is named 'Full McGuffin product spec' then there is no ambiguity.
21
Wikipedia is, I suppose, the ultimate in hyperlink use and has quite a strict linking style guideline for the ways in which URLs and hyperlinks are used within the text. Editors who don't conform to the style are quickly picked up - especially on more popular articles.
I have to say it really does make for a pretty consistent reading experience from one ...
19
There are no rules, at least no hard and fast ones. Following research to the letter can result in making an ugly site--blue links work best, but blue links on a red background are hard to read! The research however can guide you to the "best practices" and your maintain your sense of good aesthetics so you know when to break from convention.
While there ...
19
I can't say if this is the actual reason it was chosen, but a reason why purple is a good choice is that, other than red, it has the lowest relative luminocity of any hue.
So, a purple will tend to appear darker than an equivalent blue. Assuming the background is white and the text is black, and assuming we expect people to be more interested in pages they ...
19
According to, literally, the first result when you google discourse click count, Jeff Atwood defends the click counter as a valuable signal for users to determine if a link is worth clicking:
The purpose of links is to be clicked, their entire existence is predicated on being clicked at some point, and showing the click data gives you, THE READER, ...
18
Firstly this is really just an extension of an inherent problem with links in the first place, which is that the target doesn't need to have anything to do with the link text - even if the link text looks perfectly adequate. In fact I would suggest that a well written text link is even more likely to engage and fool the user than a shortened link which might ...
18
It's a heated topic to be sure, but the best insight comes from understanding the usage and intent of a user clicking a link and specifically how this relates to the work at hand and what is going on in the user's mind (i.e. what they are trying to achieve by clicking the link and how that relates to their workflow).
In general, if a link results in leaving ...
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