Tagged “usability”

Adrian recommends that we underline links in body copy and provides a host of evidence and rationale to back that up.

WCAG guidelines tell us to make sure we do not rely on color alone to distinguish links and even explicitly suggest underlines.

Usability researchers and practitioners generally suggest that underlines are the most clear way to indicate a link that lives within content.

Academic researchers confirm that … when you have them you can reduce additional cognitive load by making them apparent. Underlines performed well.

There are other sites on the web which have set expectations, but many of them likely do not correspond directly to your own circumstance. Additionally, some of them are already violating WCAG, which removes them from consideration as appropriate analogues.

Other styling options can work, but they are not necessarily universal, sometimes requiring users to learn them. They may also conflict with other styles on your site, increasing the effort (cost) for you to come up with usable, novel and progressive indicators.

Given all these factors, I recommend you underline links in your body content.

Heather suggests that in developers’ excitement to do cool new stuff and use cool new tools and techniques “we stopped letting people do very normal web things”. Things like:

• the ability to copy text so you can then paste it
• ensuring elements which navigate also behave like normal links by offering standard right-click and keyboard shortcut options etc. Which is to say – please use the anchor element and leave it alone to do its thing
• letting people go back using the back button
• letting people scroll with native scrollbars. Relatedly, letting people get to the links at the bottom of the page rather than having infinite scrolling results which mean that the footer is always just beyond reach!
• letting the user’s browser autocomplete form fields rather than making them type it

Tetralogical are doing a great series of articles on running inclusive research. Their latest is about recruiting participants and covers whether you should recruit people with disabilities as part of your testing and if so who, and how many, and how to recruit them.

Previous articles addressed moderating usability testing sessions with people with disabilities, and analysing findings from inclusive user research.